HiveRel: Towards Focused Knowledge Acquisition.

In this paper we argue that focused knowledge acquisition -- knowledge acquisition in user-defined query context -- can be best achieved through presentation of relationships between search results for a given user query. We suggest that in order to expose relationships while maintaining relevance-based layout of search results, presentation of search results could benefit from using a two-dimensional layout instead of the conventional one-dimensional ranked list. We introduce HiveRel, a search system that presents search results as tiled hexagons on a map-like surface with center-out relevance ordering, in which relationships are displayed on-demand. A user study compared HiveRel to standard web search over a range of focused knowledge acquisition tasks and two different domains. The results indicate that users completed the tasks faster and with comparable quality using HiveRel, and rated it positively.