| The growth, accessibility, and integration of the World Wide Web with contemporary information utilization provides a rich domain in which to explore information retrieval systems. One approach in the evolution of retrieval systems couples successful and long-standing techniques of information retrieval with new techniques, such as visualization. The system developed and reported in this thesis takes this approach. It builds upon well-known techniques of information retrieval including stemming, keyword matching, and cosine similarity. It also incorporates the new and relatively successful hubs and authority approach, which describes Web documents by their reference by other documents. Finally, it develops a new and unique approach to document visualization that encodes these metrics in a single visual representation. This new, easily scannable representation, allows the user to interact with search results as the scope of search is expanded dynamically across the Web. |
