In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort to find them and put together a complete picture. Several studies have proposed different forms of visualization that aim to overcome this problem and present search results in a way that adequately highlights these relations. This thesis aims to perform a comparative analysis between traditional list-based representations and visualizations that highlight the temporal and semantic relations within search engine results. A user study conducted using two prototypes encapsulating both visualizations generated results suggesting benefits to visualizing search results emphasizing specific underlying relations.
","abstract_html":"<p>In today’s digital age, search engines have become indispensable tools for finding information among the corpus of billions of webpages. The standard that most search engines follow is to display search results in a list-based format arranged according to a ranking algorithm. Although this format is good for presenting the most relevant results to users, it fails to represent the underlying relations between different results. These relations, among others, can generally be of either a temporal or semantic nature. A user who wants to explore the results that are connected by those relations would have to make a manual effort to find them and put together a complete picture. Several studies have proposed different forms of visualization that aim to overcome this problem and present search results in a way that adequately highlights these relations. This thesis aims to perform a comparative analysis between traditional list-based representations and visualizations that highlight the temporal and semantic relations within search engine results. A user study conducted using two prototypes encapsulating both visualizations generated results suggesting benefits to visualizing search results emphasizing specific underlying relations.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Qureshi, Muhammad Shahiq"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"M.S.","degree_level":"Masters Thesis","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Kerstin S. Haring","Pilyoung Kim","Chris GauthierDickey"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-11-01T07:00:00Z","date_published":"2023-11-01T07:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:48Z","subjects":["Human computer interaction","Search engine","Semantic relations","Temporal relations","Visualizations","Computer Sciences","Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces","Other Computer Sciences","Physical Sciences and Mathematics","Theory and Algorithms"],"languages":["English (eng)"],"rights":["Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
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"],"dc:subject":["Human computer interaction","Search engine","Semantic relations","Temporal relations","Visualizations","Computer Sciences","Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces","Other Computer Sciences","Physical Sciences and Mathematics","Theory and Algorithms"],"dc:title":["Enhancing Search Engine Results: A Comparative Study of Graph and Timeline Visualizations for Semantic and Temporal Relationship Discovery"],"thesis:degree_level":["Masters Thesis"],"thesis:degree_name":["M.S."]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T02:01:48Z"}