Tag clouds for summarizing web search results

In this paper, we describe an application, PubCloud that uses tagclouds for the summarization of results from queries over thePubMed database of biomedical literature. PubCloud responds toqueries of this database with tag clouds generated from wordsextracted from the abstracts returned by the query. The results ofa user study comparing the PubCloud tag-cloud summarization ofquery results with the standard result list provided by PubMedindicated that the tag cloud interface is advantageous in presenting descriptive information and in reducing user frustrationbut that it is less effective at the task of enabling users to discoverrelations between concepts.