Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for the better presentation of search results.

As an increasingly large fraction of human knowledge migrates to the World Wide Web and other information systems, finding useful information is simultaneously more important and much more difficult. In 2000, Jansen and Pooch estimated that 1 in 28 Web pages that users viewed were search results pages [11]. Today, search is among the most important activities that Web users engage in. Beyond the Web, search is a central activity for users of corporate intranets, specialized databases (from shopping to Medline), and increasingly for personal archives of documents and email.

Given the importance and ubiquity of search, it is remarkable how similar almost all search interfaces are. Users typically type a few words into a query box and receive a rank-ordered list of search results comprising document titles, brief descriptions of the objects and some metadata about the results. On the Web, such interfaces are extremely effective, considering the incredibly wide range of tasks they are used for and the very short queries provided by most users. However, even given their simplicity, it is not obvious how users utilize different information from lists of search results to complete their tasks. Do users read the descriptions? Are the URLs and other metadata used by anyone but expert searchers? Does the context of the search or the type of task being supported matter? Eye-tracking methodologies may help us to answer such questions by explicitly recording how users attend to different parts of Web search results. Figure 1 shows an example of users’ fixation patterns for a page of Web search results in our study. For this task, users were clearly reading the contextual descriptions, especially on the seventh result.

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