An Information Foraging Tool

Abstract

Electronic document repositories continue to expand rapidly; public collections, for instance the Google index, contain up to 8 billion individual items. Private electronic archives, maintained by companies, governments and other bodies grow at similar rates. While search techniques have scaled to manage these vast collections, most interfaces between search engines and searchers, usually based on a ranked list, are increasingly insufficient. This paper explains how Information Foraging Theory was applied to create visualisations of query resultsets which, when embedded in an application that contained tools to manipulate the visualisation, helped alleviate the deficiencies of the ranked list.