Visualizing of Yahoo results in text clouds: a web services-based application

Abstract

This article presents the results of a survey that evaluated the advantages of using text clouds, a technique for
visualization of information, used to present the results of a search system in the Web. The assumption of this
investigation is that by visualizing the results of a search system in text clouds may help users to find what
they are looking for, making easier the development of queries, in exploratory searches. To test this
assumption, the search we report here was developed in two stages. The first stage consisted of the
development of an application integrated to the Yahoo search system to show the results in text clouds, and,
the second, consisted of the evaluation of this application in order to test its benefits.