Why clustered search results?

"Categorizing web search results into comprehensible visual displays using meaningful and stable classifications can support user exploration, understanding, and discovery.

"....six emerging principles (Kules & Shneiderman, in process), that draw on the fields of information science, information retrieval, human-computer interaction and information visualization

Provide overviews of large sets of results
Organize results by meaningful classifications
Tightly couple category labels to results list
Arrange text for scanning/skimming
Visually encode quantitative attributes on a stable visual substrate
Support multiple visual presentations and classifications"



from a new paper by by Bill Kules and Ben Shneiderman, of the Department of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland. via Search Engine Roundtable


That's one of the reasons that we introduced clustered search results (faceted searching) in Engineering Village 2.