Web Visualization: Beyond Ranked Snippets & Thumbnails

Marian Dörk has placed a pair of PDF’s online from his presentation yesterday at the “Vis on the Web” discussion where he discusses the failures of Ranked Snippets (like Google Search Results) and Thumbnails.

As the Web continues to grow immensely, we think a logical next step is developing more visual and interactive ways for exploring the Web. However, most visual search interfaces that are currently appearing do not make use of information visualization as a way to aggregate or summarize information. Instead we see playful graphical interfaces or previews of visual Web resources that employ ranking algorithms to reduce the number of displayed items.

His paper (1 page PDF) and Presentation Slides (PDF) are available online.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .