Visual innovations for product search interfaces

Abstract

As the 'gatekeepers' of the internet, search engines provide access to a huge amount of data. Nowadays, many search engines are able to interpret user queries and automatically suggest additions or corrections. Despite these technological advances, the search paradigm itself remains stable for most engines. Especially for users with little knowledge of the search domain or a very vague idea of what they are looking for, it is difficult to formulate a query with the established keyword search paradigm. Faceted Search is one of the techniques that facilitate the process of query formulation by offering a structured and classified overview of the domain. In this paper, we give an overview of search paradigms besides keyword-based techniques and will present alternative visual approaches for product search.