Displaying Relevance Scores for Search Results

Internet search engines typically compute a relevance score for webpages given the query terms, and then rank the pages by de-creasing relevance scores. The popular search engines do not, how-ever, present the relevance scores that were computed during this process. We suggest that these relevance scores may contain infor-mation that can help users make conscious decisions. In this paper we evaluate in a user study how users react to the display of such scores. The results indicate that users understand graphical dis-plays of relevance, and make decisions based on these scores. Our results suggest that in the context of exploratory search, relevance scores may cause users to explore more search results. 1