Do users find looking at text more useful than visual representations? A comparison of three search result interfaces

The organisation, content and presentation of document surrogates has a substantial impact on the effectiveness of web search result interfaces. Most interfaces include textual information, including for example the document title, URL, and a short query-biased summary of the content. Other interfaces include additional browsing features, such as topic clustering, or thumbnails of the web pages. In this study we analyse three search interfaces, and compare the effectiveness of textual information and additional browsing features. Our analysis indicates that most users spend a substantially larger proportion of time looking at text information, and that those interfaces that focus on text-based representations of document content tend to lead to quicker task completion times for named-page finding search tasks.