Evaluating the Effectiveness of Visual Summaries for Web Search

With ever-increasing amounts of information on the World Wide Web, an effective interface for displaying search results is required. Recent studies have developed various novel approaches for visual summaries, aiming to improve the effectiveness of search results. In this study we evaluate the effectiveness of four types of visual summary: thumbnails, salient images, visual snippets and visual tags. Fifty participants carried out five informational topics using five different interfaces. The results show that visual summaries significantly impact on the behavior of users, but not on their performance when predicting the relevance of answer resources. Users spend significantly less time looking at the textual components of summaries with the visual summary interfaces. Comparing the performance of users in predicting the relevance of answer pages with a text interface versus visual interfaces suggests that the tested visual summaries can mislead users to select non relevant items on informational search topics.