Effectiveness of additional representations for the search result presentation on the web

The presentation of search results on the web has been dominated by the textual form of document representation. On the other hand, the document’s visual aspects such as the layout, colour scheme, or presence of images have been studied in a limited context with regard to their effectiveness of search result presentation. This article presents a comparative evaluation of textual and visual forms of document representation as additional components of document surrogates. A total of 24 people were recruited for our task-based user study. The experimental results suggest that an increased level of document representation available in the search results can facilitate users’ interaction with a search interface. The results also suggest that the two forms of additional representations are likely beneficial to users’ information searching process in different contexts.