  We are interested in questions of improving user control in best-match
text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple
visualizations that nonetheless go beyond the minimal ones generally available
can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help
users decide-given a set of documents retrieved by a query-which documents and
passages are worth closer examination. We built a document viewer incorporating
a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color
term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is helpful to
non-expert searchers. Participants' reaction to the visualization was very
positive, while the objective results were inconclusive.
