An empirical evaluation of user interfaces for topic management of Web sites

Topic management is the task of gathering, evaluating,organizing, and sharing a set of web sites for a specific topic.Current web tools do not provide adequate support for this task. Wecreated the TopicShop system to address this need. TopicShopincludes (1) a webcrawler that discovers relevant web sites andbuilds site profiles, and (2) user interfaces for exploring andorganizing sites. We conducted an empirical study comparing userperformance with TopicShop vs. YahooTM. TopicShop subjects foundover 80% more high-quality sites (where quality was determined byindependent expert judgements) while browsing only 8 1% as manysites and completing their task in 89% of the time. The siteprofile data that TopicShop provides - in particular, the number ofpages on a site and the number of other sites that link to it - wasthe key to these results, as users exploited it to identify themost promising sites quickly and easily.