Informing Science InSITE- “Where Parallels Intersect ” June 2002 Using Keywords to Improve the Display of a Search Results List

This article presents the results of a comparative study of various user interfaces used to obtain search results from textual databases. This study is one of a series carried out at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It focuses on the display of text elements in search results and their impact on user behavior. The findings indicate several distinct benefits in the interface developed for the experiment, in which the search results display consists of the document title, keywords, and several lines from the text that fulfill the search criteria. These user benefits include ease of use, increased confidence that the parameters defined for the search query will yield the correct results and allow successful completion of the task, and satisfaction with the relevance of the information displayed