Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

   
6. Using Hyperlinks to Organize Retrieval Results

retrieval results!hyperlinks, use of hyperlinks in user interfaces

Although the SuperBook authors describe it as a hypertext system, it is actually better thought of as a means of showing search results in the context of a structure that users can understand and view all at once. The hypertext component was not analyzed separately to assess its importance, but it usually is not mentioned by the authors when describing what is successful about their design. In fact, it seems to be responsible for one of the main problems seen with the revised version of the system -- that users tend to wander off (often unintentionally) from the pages they are reading, thus causing the time spent on a given topic to be longer for SuperBook in some cases. (Using completion time to evaluate users on browsing tasks can be problematic, however, since by definition browsing is a casual, unhurried process [#!waterworth91!#].)

This wandering may occur in part because SuperBook uses a non-standard kind of hypertext, in which any word is automatically linked to occurrences of the same word in other parts of the document. This has not turned out to be how hypertext links are created in practice. Today, hyperlinked help systems and hyperlinks on the Web make much more discriminating use of hyperlink connections (in part since they are usually generated by an author rather than automatically). These links tend to be labeled in a somewhat meaningful manner by their surrounding context. Back-of-the-book indexes often do not contain listings of every occurrence of a word, but rather to the more important uses or the beginnings of series of uses. Automated hypertext linking should perhaps be based on similar principles. Additionally, at least one study showed that users formed better mental models of a small hypertext system that was organized hierarchically than one that allowed more flexible access [#!edwards88!#]. Problems relating to navigation of hypertext structure have long been suspected and investigated in the hypertext literature [#!Con87!#,#!mcaleese88!#,#!kim95!#,#!halasz87!#].

More recent work has made better use of hyperlink information for providing context for retrieval results. Some of this work is described below.