It wasn't all that long ago that Alta Vista was the hands-down favorite search engine. Then something called Google came along. Now computer scientists at Case Western Reserve University think they may have something even better than Google, although they're still lacking a catchy name.
Would you believe it's called the Conjunctive Exploratory Navigation Interface (CENI)? OK, but other than that, the researchers say their creation saves users time by more quickly identifying and retrieving the most relevant information on their computers and hand-held devices.
"Most people have an iPhone or laptop that stores a wide variety of information and, often, you can't find it when you need it, even though you know it's there," said GQ Zhang, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, division chief of Medical Informatics at Case Western Reserve and an author of the study.
"Or, you go to a website where the content has been divided under different areas, and what you're looking for fits several. If you choose one area but whoever filed the data chose another area, you may not find that information," Zhang said.
Crowdsourced testing
Anonymous testers recruited through crowdsourcing preferred the new search tool nearly two-to-one over a keyword-based lookup interface and the most commonly available lookup search interface using Google, according to the study, published in the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research.
Side-by-side comparisons showed CENI, which combines two search modes and a more comprehensive way to organize and tag data, is more effective than looking up items by matched keywords alone.
They describe CENI as an on-screen portal where users access data by browsing through menus of topics and typing in keywords and say it provides a more focused search and retrieves the most pertinent information.
In one test, for example, a keyword search came up with 89 responses to a question: "What are the typical vision problems associated with diabetes?" CENI came up with the most applicable 13 by selecting appropriate menus.
CENI overcomes this limitation by allowing data to be tagged into as many areas as relevant, and provides an interface and system that leverages multiple tags for each single data item.
Prototype site
Zhang and Licong Cui, a PhD student in Zhang's lab, have a working prototype designed specifically for the health resource website, NetWellness. This not-for-profit site allowed the public to ask health professionals at Case Western Reserve, Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati health-related questions. More than 60,000 questions and answers are searchable using CENI. The interface is currently not available to the public.
Health information is highly sought after. A Pew Foundation survey found that 80 percent of Internet users have searched for health information, and 60 percent used that information to help make health-care decisions.
But a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that accessing health information using simple terms on such search engines as Google and Yahoo was inefficient. Less than a quarter of the searches led to relevant information, the study found.
This kind of search, called "lookup," can overwhelm the user with a long list of document links the user must then sift through, Zhang said. "If results do not show up in the first couple of pages, they are lost because the user is not going to go through millions of links manually."
CENI combines lookup and another search method, called "exploratory navigation." The exploratory mode enables users who lack a specific target or have trouble forming descriptive lookup terms to use menus of topics to navigate and explore information.
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