Google Visualization

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Select your Google's results page visualizationThe Internet and search engines are an integral part of people's everyday life around the world, because they provide a plethora of information sources that are available, affordable, comfortable and fast. Online search is the most common task today on the Internet.

Different visualizations of the search results that were retrieved by the search engine may affect the ability of users to find result in the quickest way and the most relevant content. There are 3 major methods to show such information to the user:

List – The most common way to display search results is a vertical list of information that summarized the documents that were retrieved for the query.

Google's knowledge graph - Google builds the Knowledge Graph based on all the queries of the users and on links between web pages, based on databases analysis and maybe even other sources. The knowledge graph enables display not just a collection of links to web pages, but an "information card" that includes information regarding the entity that the user searched for.

Clustering - grouping the items by a certain measure of similarity between them.

The purpose of the study is to compare between the three types of visualization: list, clusters and knowledge Graph, presenting the search results for different search tasks. In the study we will examine six search tasks: navigation (finding a specific website), simple search, advanced search, locate and explore. In order to control the effect of different search engines (engines may retrieve different results), all the searches will be performed on the world most popular Search Engine: Google.

The criterions for comparing the three types of visualizations in each of the five search tasks were: search effectiveness (whether users answered correctly), search efficiency (how long it took to get the right answer) and user satisfaction with search results.