Enhancing Snippet Visualizations to Improve Web Search

Various snippet visualizations have been suggested to assist users in assessing the relevance of their online search results, including highlighting query terms and incorporating target page thumbnails. This study introduced two enhancements: shades and multiple thumbnails. In the shades visualization, query terms in the snippet are background highlighted in different shades based on the number of adjacent query terms. The multiple thumbnail visualization presents reduced-size thumbnails of the target landing page. A 3 × 3 experimental design examined the effects of thumbnails (no thumbnail, single thumbnail, multiple thumbnails) and highlighting (no highlighting, yellow background highlighting, shades), and their combined use on 37 participants’ effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction when performing complex search tasks. The results showed that although the shades and multiple thumbnail visualizations had no significant effect on users’ effectiveness compared to the baseline textual snippet visualization, they both significantly (p < 0.0001) improved users’ efficiency and satisfaction, and their combined effect was synergetic. The findings have operative implications for web search interface design.