Date of Award

11-2023

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Computer Science

First Advisor

Kerstin S. Haring

Second Advisor

Pilyoung Kim

Third Advisor

Chris GauthierDickey

Keywords

Human computer interaction, Search engine, Semantic relations, Temporal relations, Visualizations

Abstract

In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort to find them and put together a complete picture. Several studies have proposed different forms of visualization that aim to overcome this problem and present search results in a way that adequately highlights these relations. This thesis aims to perform a comparative analysis between traditional list-based representations and visualizations that highlight the temporal and semantic relations within search engine results. A user study conducted using two prototypes encapsulating both visualizations generated results suggesting benefits to visualizing search results emphasizing specific underlying relations.

Copyright Date

11-2023

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Muhammad Shahiq Qureshi

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

144 pgs

File Size

8.3 MB

Discipline

Computer science



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