Do Users Find Looking at Text More Useful than Visual Representations? A Comparison of Three Search Result Interfaces

The organisation, content and presentation of doc-ument surrogates has a substantial impact on the effec-tiveness of web search result interfaces. Most interfaces include textual information, including for example the document title, URL, and a short query-biased sum-mary of the content. Other interfaces include additional browsing features, such as topic clustering, or thumb-nails of the web pages. In this study we analyse three search interfaces, and compare the effectiveness of tex-tual information and additional browsing features. Our analysis indicates that most users spend a substantially larger proportion of time looking at text information, and that those interfaces that focus on text-based rep-resentations of document content tend to lead to quicker task completion times for named-page finding search tasks