INTERACTIVE WEB INFORMATION RETRIEVAL USING GRAPHICAL WORD INDICATORS

摘要

An apparatus and method is provided that conducts a web search or other computer readable document search and obtains search results comprising a number of meta-documents where each meta-document describes a web pages or other document located in the search. The meta-documents retrieved in the search results are then analyzed to determine the frequency of occurrence of terms used in these meta-documents and the most commonly occurring of these terms are then presented in a visual representation to the user to allow the user to see what are the most commonly occurring of these terms as well as the frequency with which these terms appear relative to other terms in the search results. Using the visual representations of these commonly occurring terms, a user can re-sort the search results by selected terms or alter the original search query by adding or removing terms from the search query.