Organizing Search Results into a Table to Assist in Understanding and Expanding Search Target

We propose a meta-search system that assists users in understanding search results and expanding the search scope. The system assumes that the documents to be searched are tagged and that hierarchical semantic relationships are defined among the tags. It organizes search results generated by a search engine in the form of a table based on the hierarchical relationships and presents them to the user. The user can proceed with information exploration by selecting documents and tags hierarchically arranged in the table. To evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a user experiment using a Wikipedia search service built with the system. The results confirmed that the proposed system is superior to the system using the conventional method of presenting search results in exploratory search support.