Investigation on effect of snippet on user´s relevance judgment of documents

This paper investigates the effect of a snippet on users´ relevance judgment of a document. Web search engines are becoming very useful tools in our daily life. One of the most important features of modern search engines is a snippet, which is expected to help users to find relevant pages immediately. Therefore, improving the quality of a snippet is important for minimizing the cost of user feedback required for finding relevant pages. This paper investigates the effect of a snippet on users´ relevance judgment of a document by comparing users´ relevance judgment when a snippet is provided and those without providing a snippet. The experimental results show providing snippets reduces users´ judgment time, while keeping judgment accuracy. It is also shown the effect of snippet length on judgment time is strong when judging relevant documents. The obtained results will contribute to the improvement of a snippet generation method in terms of minimal user feedback.