A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of Search Result Presentation on the Web

Presentation of search results in Web-based information retrieval (IR) systems has been dominated by a textual form of information such as the title, snippet, URL, and/or file type of retrieved documents. On the other hand, document's visual aspects such as the layout, colour scheme, or presence of images have been studied in a limited context with regard to their effectiveness of search result presentation. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of textual and visual forms of document summaries as the additional document surrogate in the search result presentation. In our study, a sentence-based summarisation technique was used to create a textual document summary, and the thumbnail image of web pages was used to represent a visual summary. The experimental results suggest that both have the cases where the additional elements contributed to a positive effect not only in users' relevance assessment but also in query re/formulation. The results also suggest that the two...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Hideo Joho, Joemon M. Jose
• Keywords: Document Summary, Document's Visual Aspects, ECIR 2006, Information Technology, Textual Document Summary