Using thumbnails to search the Web

We introduce a technique for creating novel, textuallyenhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of image thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. We found a strong effect of question category. For some questions, text outperformed plain thumbnails, while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed text. Enhanced thumbnails (which combine the features of text summaries and plain thumbnails) were more consistent than either text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all categories the best performance or performance that was statistically indi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Allison Woodruff, Andrew Faulring, Ruth Rosenholtz, Julie Morrsion, Peter Pirolli
• Keywords: CHI 2001, Enhanced Thumbnails, Human Computer Interaction, Plain Thumbnails, Thumbnails Outperformed Text