SciNet:
Researchers from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT at Aalto University and University of Helsinki have developed a technique called interactive intent modeling that allows humans to direct exploratory search. The technique has been implemented in a real-world search engine SciNet. New Search Engine SciNet that outperforms current ones, and helps people to do searches more efficiently.
Researchers says, New Search Engine SciNet is different because it changes internet searches into recognition tasks, by showing keywords related to the user’s search in topic radar. Also they added people using SciNet can get relevant and diverse search results faster, especially when they do not know exactly what they are looking for or how to formulate a query to find it.
How SciNet results will be? Once the query initialized, SciNet displays a range of keywords and topics in a topic radar. With the help of the directions on the radar, the engine displays how these topics are related to each other. Based on the distance from the center point of topic radar, keyword relevance is considered. If the keyword is more relevant to the query then it get displayed near the center point of topic radar or if the keyword is irrelevant it get displayed far away from the center of topic radar.
SciNet also offers alternatives that are connected with the topic, but which the user might not have thought of querying. By moving words around the topic radar, users specify what information is most useful for them.
In SciNet people are typically reluctant to reformulate the original query if they are unsure about the topic. With the help of a keyword cloud, people can more quickly infer which of the search options they receive is more significant for them because they do not need to visit the pages offered by the search engine to find new search words and start again.
Project’s coordinator, Tuukka Ruotsalo adds that the results are easier for people to recognize what information they want from the options offered by the SciNet search engine. Researchers have founded a company Etsimo Ltd to commercialize the search engine.
More about search: http://augmentedresearch.hiit.fi/