A method prioritizes search results provided to a client according to client satisfaction with previous search results. The method tracks client activity with respect to the previous search results, determines individual client satisfaction for each item according to the tracked client activity, and provides one or more of the items determined to have a high client satisfaction. A user interface provides prioritized search results to a client according to client satisfaction with a previous search similar to the current search. The user interface comprises an item display of at least one item determined to have a high client satisfaction level and at least one item not determined to have a high client satisfaction level.

Rating information retrieval algorithms. A query is received and submitted to a search engine for execution on an index file. A list of index documents and a plurality of attributes are received from the search engine in response to the submitted query. A portion of the received list of index documents and the received plurality of attributes are stored in a subindex file. The received query is executed on the subindex file to obtain a list of subindex documents. The obtained list of subindex documents is ranked by a particular ranking algorithm using the attributes associated therewith. The list of ranked subindex documents is compared with a list of subjectively ranked documents to generate a score for the particular ranking algorithm. The generated score represents a degree of correlation between the list of ranked subindex documents and the list of subjectively ranked documents.

Systems and methods for collaborative searching are described. In an embodiment of the present invention, a database stores previously executed queries and corresponding results. An application server compares an entered query with the previously executed queries. If the application server finds a query that is substantially similar to the entered query, the application server returns the results corresponding to the previously executed query. If no substantially similar result is found, the query is executed against one or more data sources. When results are returned, an embodiment provides the user with the ability to rate them. The ratings are used to determine the similarity of various queries.

Techniques are presented for determining a first set of display elements, each display element associated with a first display characteristic. An interesting element in the first set of display elements is determined. A second set of elements related to the interesting element is determined. A third set of elements based on the first and second set of elements is determined using intersection, union, subtraction addition and other logical operations. A third set of elements not yet added to the element collection is determined. The elements in the third set are associated with a second or ghosted display characteristic. The elements in the third set are inserted within the sorted context of the visualization based on spatial distortion rules which help to preserve spatial memory cues in the visualization of the element collection. The elements may be documents in an information repository, linked contact information, linked information records in a database or other types of information.