I have done a fair bit of usability research with web search engines and how people deal with them. Curiously, our participants seemed to make better relevance decisions using just the page titles alone than the page titles along with something else. This implied that abstracting information from the main text content (whether initial mention, keyword embedded like Google, keyword extraction etc) actually misleads searchers into thinking that the document is more relevant than it actually is.
However, people disliked using titles alone more than using some extra text from the document. Pictures didn't seem to play an important role unless they were looking for a specific thing / product / company and this was displayed. So there seemed to be a balance: decisions of a document's relevance to an information need were better made with less information, but users were less happy with dealing with search like this. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=41852 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
