SIGIR'98 demonstrations: Cha-Cha: Presenting Web Site Search Results in Context

Cha-Cha: Presenting Web Site Search Results in Context


Michael Chen
Department of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1776, USA.

Marti A. Hearst
School of Information Management and Systems, University of Californai, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600, USA.


Abstract

We address search over large, heterogeneous web sites such as those found at universities and within corporate intranets. The goal is to make use of structure implicit within the site to provide context for the retrieved documents, even for those sites for which there is no centralized organization. Most web search engines simply list titles, urls, and abstracts, and thus do not place the results in context.

We will demonstrate our alternative: a simple but novel approach to organizing and presenting the results of search over the pages of a large, heterogeneous web site. The main idea is to show, for each page matching the query, the path of web links that a user would follow from a root page to the search hit. The resulting interface, which we call Cha-Cha, is a hierarchical characterization of the search results that both shows the context in which the hits appear and educates the user about the structure of the web site.


SIGIR'98
24-28 August 1998
Melbourne, Australia.
sigir98@cs.mu.oz.au.