Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

     
2. Mapuccino: Graphical Depiction of Link Structure

retrieval results!WebCutter WebCutter

The Mapuccino system (formerly WebCutter) [#!WebCutter!#] allows the user to issue a query on a particular Web site. The system crawls the site in real-time, checking each encountered page for relevance to the query. When a relevant page is found, the weights on that page's outlinks are increased. Thus, the search is based partly on an assumption that relevant pages will occur near one another in the Web site. The subset of the Web site that has been crawled is depicted graphically in a nodes-and-links view (see Figure ). This kind of displaydoes not provide the user with information about what the contents of the pages are, but rather only shows their link structure. Other researchers have also investigated spreading activation among hypertext links as a way to guide an information retrieval system, e.g., [#!frei94!#,#!menczer98!#].

  

Figure: Example of a Web subset visualized by Mapuccino (courtesy of M. Jacovi, B. Shaul and Y. Maarek).