=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=SearchPanel: A Browser Extension for Managing Search Activity
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1033/paper8.pdf
|volume=Vol-1033
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/eurohcir/TretterGQ13
}}
==SearchPanel: A Browser Extension for Managing Search Activity==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1033/paper8.pdf
SearchPanel: A browser extension
for managing search activity
Simon Tretter Gene Golovchinsky Pernilla Qvarfordt
University of Amsterdam FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands 3174 Porter Drive 3174 Porter Drive
Palo Alto, CA Palo Alto, CA
s.tretter@gmail.com gene@fxpal.com pernilla@fxpal.com
ABSTRACT documents in relation to the searcher’s activity: how many
People often use more than one query when searching for times was a document retrieved, whether it was viewed be-
information; they also revisit search results to re-find infor- fore, etc. This kind of information can help searchers to
mation. These tasks are not well-supported by search inter- remember, understand and plan their search processes.
faces and web browsers. We designed and built a Chrome The browser plugin enhances the searcher’s ability to use
browser extension that helps people manage their ongoing process metadata to understand their search results and to
information seeking. The extension combines document and plan subsequent activity by displaying surrogates for the
process metadata into an interactive representation of the current set of retrieved documents. We represent prior re-
retrieved documents that can be used for sense-making, for trieval state, whether a document was opened, and whether
navigation, and for re-finding documents. it was bookmarked in an integrated overview that appears
at the side of the browser window. We also make it pos-
sible for searchers to examine multiple documents without
1. INTRODUCTION returning to the search results or using multiple tabs.
Broder et al. [3] proposed a taxonomy of web search that The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: we
included transactional and navigational searches in addition review the relevant related work, describe the browser ex-
to the more traditional (from an IR perspective) informa- tension, and conclude with a discussion of the design space.
tional searches. To this taxonomy we might add re-finding
[17] [5], the task of locating a previously-found document.
From a theoretical perspective, it is not clear whether refind- 2. RELATED WORK
ing is a different kind of search activity or an orthogonal di- There are two broad categories of related work: the man-
mensions. Regardless, while major web search engines offer agement of search history and the representation of search
simple and efficient interfaces for navigational and transac- results. Refinding has received increasing attention recently.
tional searches, relatively little support is available for more While the browser implements some history mechanisms,
complex informational search or re-finding. these are typically not well-suited to users’ needs [15]. El-
These seemingly neglected activities are not unimportant, sweiler and Ruthven [5] described different patterns of re-
however: Teevan et al. [17] reported that 39% of queries are finding; Teevan [16] proposed a mechanism for merging pre-
re-finding queries; furthermore, 20-30% of searches represent viously-found and newly-retrieved documents. More explicit
open-ended informational needs [13]. Related, Qvarfordt et management of search history has also been investigated in
al. [11] found query overlap rates of 50-60% in exploratory the literature; see [7] for a succinct summary.
search, and suggested that awareness of this overlap may be Information overload due to large numbers of results is
useful in supporting more efficient searching behavior. Thus a common problem in information seeking [2]. This prob-
we decided to explore ways in which searchers’ interactions lem can be addressed in a variety of ways. MetaSpider
with search engines could be enhanced to support these more [4] uses a 2D map to display and classify retrieved doc-
complex information-seeking tasks. uments. Grokker [8] uses nested circular and rectangular
We created a web browser extension that enriches com- shapes to present results and also shows them in a hier-
mon web search engine interfaces and addresses important arachical grouped way. Sparkler [12] uses a star plot for the
deficits with respect to open-ended (exploratory) search and result presentation, where every star represents a document.
re-finding. Our extension visualizes search results to help One potential issue with the systems above is that the
users find the right document or documents by visualizing overall organization of the interface itself may induce us-
metadata of the retrieved pages. ability problems. Complex interfaces allow more individual
Following Golovchinsky et al. [7] we distinguish docu- settings to be specified by a user, but simple interfaces allow
ment metadata from process metadata. Document metadata a broader spectrum of users to use them. This tradeoff is
– dates of publication, titles, hosting web sites, etc. – are not trivial to handle, and as we see nowadays, most Web
basic characteristics of documents that are independent of search interfaces tend to be quite simple.
the means by which these documents were retrieved. Pro- Supporting the searcher’s decision making process can be
cess metadata, on the other hand, characterize aspects of crucial for effective search performance for complex infor-
mation needs. This support can take the form of enhanced
Presented at EuroHCIR2013. Copyright c 2013 for the individual papers
by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted only for private and academic surrogates for documents. One type of information often
purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. used for this purpose is document metadata (author, date,
images of the document, etc.). Even et al. [6] has shown Table 1: Design space: Activities and supporting features
that the decision making process can be highly improved by related to document and process metadata. ”Doc” refers to
adding process metadata (in our case information that is re- document metadata and ”Proc” to process metadata.
lated to the search process) to the user interface. Research
has shown that presenting simple tasks in a slightly differ- Activity Feature Doc Proc
ent way may help the user to understand how the search Search perform search yes no
is performing and what can be done to gain better results switch engine no yes
[18]. One common example of incorporating process meta- results list yes no
data in web browsers is the practice of changing the color of visit status no yes
a traversed link anchor. visualize no. of visits no yes
Spoerri [14] showed that users can benefit from different Navigation access results - -
or additional visualizations of web search results. However, mark current result path no yes
none of the techniques above have been integrated by major identify results: preview yes no
search engines into their main interfaces. In some cases, ex- snippet
tension developers have enhanced the user experience of web identify results: favicon yes no
search. Examples include: SearchPreview[9] that fetches Organization bookmarking no yes
screen shots of the result pages and shows them directly organize bookmarks no yes
next to the each search result. Bettersearch[1] is a Firefox
extension that performs a similar task, but also enriches the When searchers find useful web pages, they may wish to
result page with more features and links. For example, this save those documents for future access. More specialized
extention allows users to open a result in a new tab, or adds search engines sometimes support this capability directly,
links to a search result to quickly show the web page on the but it is most often supported only by the browser’s book-
”Wayback Machine”1 . WebSearch Pro [10] is also a Firefox marking capability.
extension that adds the ability to look up a text by high- We can consider these search and sense-making activities
lighting it on a page. Another feature is drag&drop zones in light of the kinds of information required to satisfy them.
to search for things directly from any website. In particular, Table 1 shows when document and process
metadata might be pertinent for the different categories of
search activities. A representation of the number of visits
3. BROWSER EXTENSION to a retrieved result (process metadata) could be used by a
To compensate for the deficiencies of SERPs we created a searcher to decide how to interact with that result. In a re-
browser extension called SearchPanel. This extension com- finding sub task, for example, searchers might want to ignore
bines document and process metadata in a visual represen- newly-found documents or pages that were not opened.
tation of search results to help people manage their infor- The purpose of the search panel is to complement the
mation seeking. We chose the browser extension approach SERP and to be available when exploring search results; we
rather than creating a proxy for several reasons. While both wanted the design to be simple and unobtrusive but still
offer the potential of parsing and augmenting SERP and convey useful information. Some features (e.g., organizat-
document pages, a browser extension has some advantages. ing bookmarks) listed in Table 1 are too complex to be in-
It scales better with respect to storing user history data. It tegrated into the extension. Others, such as favicons, while
ensures a higher level of data privacy, since data that might seemingly trivial, may still provide useful information for
potentially reveal user interests (e.g., query keywords, se- navigating search results.
lected URLs, etc.) can be logged as hashed values. Finally,
it has access to bookmarks and local browsing history. 3.2 Implementation
3.1 Design space SearchPanel displays automatically on the right side of the
browser window when it is enabled (Figure 1). The right side
When performing search tasks, searchers may need differ- of the content page has been chosen because this location is
ent kinds of information to support their information seek- frequently free of document content. In cases of overlap, its
ing. We represent the design space as consisting of three vertical position can be adjusted manually to accommodate
categories of activities: search activity, navigation activity, page content that may be occluded.
and organization activity. SearchPanel displays immediately after a search has been
Historically, web UI support for the search process, or performed on a supported web search engine (currently, they
search activity, has been focused on query formulation and are Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo, Bing and Microsoft Aca-
understanding the current query. Web browsers offer lim- demic Search). SearchPanel remains visible even if the sear-
ited support for comparing current results set with earlier cher follows links from retrieved documents. In addition,
activity by marking the visited status of documents. searchers can return directly to the original query, or re-run
When engaged with a search task, users need to shift their it on a different search engine.
attention between the SERP and the retrieved pages. In A short tutorial page is displayed at installation, and can
some cases, the searcher does not find the desired informa- also be reached through the option menu. This page also
tion in a retrieved document, but rather in links to other allows logging (see 3.2.4) to be disabled, and can be used to
documents containing relevant information. This naviga- delete the recorded history.
tion activity can be an important part of the information
seeking process. 3.2.1 Document metadata
1 SearchPanel displays several kinds of document metadata.
The Wayback Machine is a service that provides access to
archived and historical versions of web sites. Documents are represented by bars arranged in order corre-
Figure 2: Highlighting of snippet on the SERP when mous-
ing over SearchPanel.
Figure 3: Snippets of other pages are shown on a document
Figure 1: SearchPanel control annotated to show impor- page when mousing over SearchPanel.
tant aspects. 1 search engine selector; 2 bar representing
a newly-found page; 3 favicon representing the site from the star to bookmark the corresponding page. Second, pre-
viously bookmarked documents in the SERP will show a
which the page was retrieved; 4 bar representing page that
yellow star next to them. This allows to re-find a web page
has been visited; 5 highlighted bar based on cursor posi- quicker, as the user does not need to navigate to a document
tion; 6 bookmark indicator; 7 currently-selected page. to know if they have previously bookmarked it.
sponding to the retrieved list; clicking on a bar is equivalent 3.2.3 Navigational support
to clicking on a link on the SERP. Almost all websites have The selection indicator (see item 7 in Figure 1) indicates
icons (favicons) to help re-identify the web page quickly; the currently-selected result page. If a link on a result page
these icons are shown to the right of the bar (see Figure 1, is clicked, the page indicator will stay on the last retrieved
item 3 ). A tooltip with the title of the document is added document page to indicate that navigation started with it.
to each bar as well. We considered identifying other meta- Hovering over the result highlights the associated bar (item
data such as document MIME type, but that would incur 5 ), and also highlights the corresponding snippet in the
the overhead of a separate HTTP request for each document. SERP (Figure 2); the SERP is scrolled as necessary to bring
At least initially, we chose not to pursue this strategy. highlighted snippet into view. Conversely, when the mouse
is over a snippet on the SERP, the related bar jiggles left-
3.2.2 Process metadata right to reinforce the connection between the two.
Process metadata is also incorporated into SearchPanel. When the user navigates off the SERP to a search re-
First, the icon of the search engine that ran the search is sult, SearchPanel remains active. Clicking on bars navigates
highlighted in the top bar (item 1 ). Other icons repre- among the retrieved documents, bypassing the intermediate
sent available comparable search engines. Clicking on one step of reloading the search results. When the mouse is over
of these icons re-runs the query with the selected search en- a bar in SearchPanel, the SERP snippet of that result will
gine. Search engines are grouped into two categories (web be shown. This can be seen in Figure 3, where a preview
search and academic research) and only the relevant ones are of the Wolfram Alpha snippet is shown. If the snippet is
shown. The current selection (highlighted with a black bor- not available, a tooltip with the document title is shown
der) links back to the search result page if the user navigates instead. Both of these features should make it easier and
to one of the retrieved documents. more efficient to navigate the search results without neces-
Each bar can have one of three different colors, depending sarily creating a large number of tabs in the process.
on the link history. If a link has never been retrieved before,
the state of the link is ”new” and the color will be teal. Re- 3.2.4 Logging
sults that have been retrieved by prior queries but have not The extension was created to study people’s information
been clicked on are colored blue. Visited links are colored seeking behaviors. The goal of the project is to understand
violet. The local browser history is examined to retrieve the how people use the web when looking for information to
link status. This allows us to incorporate page views that improve their search experience. Therefore logging of user
occurred before SearchPanel was installed. activity was necessary. To encapsulate it from the basic
Each bar’s length reflects the frequency of retrieval of the functionality it was designed as plugin that could be con-
corresponding page. The more frequently a page has been nected or disconnected from SearchPanel. It collects infor-
retrieved, the shorter the bar gets (item 3 ). The retrieval mation related to the use of SearchPanel for the purposes of
history is stored locally in the browser for privacy reasons statistical analysis of patterns of behavior.
and can be deleted through SearchPanel’s option page. To maximize searchers’ privacy, no personally-identifying
In SearchPanel, the bookmarking function serves two pur- information is saved. Queries and found URLs are recorded
poses (item 6 in Figure 1). First, searchers can click on as MD5-hashed values only. This allows us to identify re-
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