Exploratory Search Pipes with Scoped Facets

This paper presents faceted search technology tailored to the peculiarities of exploratory search tasks. In contrast to traditional faceted search systems, facets in our system are arranged as a pipe, i.e., are applied sequentially one after the other. Moreover, the facets in a pipe are not applied throughout the whole sequence, but are limited to a user-definable scope, such that the search query can be broadened by adding a facet to the pipe. By this modification, the user interaction with our exploratory search engine resembles rather an open walk through the facet space spanned by the connections between documents and facets, than a progressive filtering of the document collection. We argue that this shift in the interaction paradigm is a much better fit to exploratory search scenarios. A user study with a prototype implementation attests an improved usability of our system compared to traditional faceted search systems for complex exploratory search tasks.