Techniques for Organizing and Presenting Search Results: A Survey

With the exponential growth of information available on the Internet, an important challenge is to find useful information using search engines. Most user queries tend to be short and imprecise in nature, and consequently, search engines bring back several thousands or millions of results that a user has to sift through. In most cases, users have to come up with appropriate keywords to find documents of interest, and modify those keywords based on results returned by the search system. One of the key techniques used by researchers and practitioners to address the issue of information overload involves organizing and presenting search results in a way that helps users find documents of interest. In order to better understand these techniques, the paper presents a classification methodology based on the structure and use of the document corpus metadata inside a search engine. This paper uses this classification methodology to explain techniques such as classification and clustering used to organize search engine results, and techniques such as lists and categories used to display organized results in the user interface. The paper then addresses whether these techniques are effective in satisfying the information needs of users from available empirical evidence and relates the evaluation to the classification methodology. The key contributions of this paper are (a) a classification methodology for the various techniques used to organize and present search results, (b) an extensive survey of these techniques with examples and figures where appropriate, and (c) a discussion regarding alignment of these techniques with respect to user needs.