User Interaction with Novel Web Search Interfaces

Search result organisation and presentation is an important component of a Web search system, it can have a substantial impact on the ability of users to find useful information. In this study we compare the effectiveness of three publicly available search interfaces for supporting navigational search tasks. The three interfaces vary primarily in the proportion of visual versus textual cues that are used to display a search result. Our analysis shows that users' search completion time varies greatly among interfaces, and an appropriate combination of textual and visual information leads to shortest search completion time and the least number of wrong answers