Effects of Time Constraints and Search Results Presentation on Web Search

Everybody experiences time constraints in their day­-to­-day lives, possibly influencing our judgment abilities and behavior. In contemporary daily life, search en­gines are regularly consulted to look for information online with searchers commonly experiencing time pressure during the web search process. Therefore, this work investigates how different time constraints influence task performance and search behavior in time-pressured web search. Also, the susceptibility of various elements of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to time constraints is explored. Moreover, the impact of different SERP interfaces on user experience and the degree to which affinity for technology moderates the relationship between time constraints and task performance is examined. To that extent, a crowd-sourced user study in which participants are tasked with finding arguments against or in favor of a controversial topic under a time constraint is conducted. The results show that task performance is considerably decreased by stricter time constraints. Furthermore, as time constraints tightened, the rate at which participants issued queries increased. Exploratory results suggest this comes as the cost of reduced depth to which individuals click on results in the ranked list. As for the interaction between SERP interfaces and time constraints, no susceptibility to the effects of time constraints was found. Interestingly, user experience was neither worsened nor improved because of the experimental SERP interfaces and affinity for technology interaction was not found to play a moderating role in the relationship between time constraints and task performance.