A comparison on the use of text summaries, plain thumbnails, and enhanced thumbnails for web search tasks

A. Woodruff, R. Rosenholtz, J. Morrison, A. Faulring, & P. Pirolli


Abstract

We introduce a technique for creating novel, enhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of plain thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. As expected, there was a strong effect of question category. For some questions, text summaries outperformed plain thumbnails, while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed text summaries. Enhanced thumbnails (which combine the features of text summaries and plain thumbnails) had more consistent performance than either text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all categories the best performance or performance that was statistically indistinguishable from the best.

Information

title:
A comparison on the use of text summaries, plain thumbnails, and enhanced thumbnails for web search tasks
author:
A. Woodruff,
R. Rosenholtz,
J. Morrison,
A. Faulring,
& P. Pirolli
citation:
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53, (2), 172-185, 2002
shortcite:
J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. & Tech.
year:
2002
created:
2002-01-01
summary:
websearch02
keyword:
rosenholtz,
uiinfovis
pdf:
http://web.mit.edu/rruth/www/Papers/2001-10-29-JASIS-thumbnails-Proof.pdf
pageid:
websearch02
type:
publication
 
publications/websearch02.txt · Last modified: 2012/04/20 11:18 by rosenholtz
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