A visual representation of search-engine queries and their results

The paper presents a visual technique for representing search engine results: the R-Wheel. The paper shows how the R-Wheel can be adapted to weight the relevance of individual terms of a multi-term query for input to a search engine. Five experiments are described requiring users to differentiate the importance of terms in a multi-term query; rank R-Wheels with the same and differing overall relevance; shade segments of an R-Wheel in proportion to the relevance of a query term; compare the R-Wheel with other representations and rank the representations in order of ease of interpretation. The paper concludes that the R-Wheel appears to be a valuable tool in visualising search engine results.