What snippet size is needed in mobile web search?

Jaewon Kim, Paul Thomasx, Ramesh Sankaranarayana, Tom Gedeony, Hwan Jin Yoon

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    31 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    A snippet (content summary for a web page) is one of the main elements in a search result page. Search engines have been improved to reduce users' effort in web search, e.g., providing exible snippet sizes by considering the purpose of the search and suggesting predicted answers. In most cases, search engines for mobile devices present two or three lines of snippet for each result link. Some studies suggest that long snippets provide a better search experience on desktop screens, but this may not be true for mobile devices because of the smaller screen. We conducted a user study to investigate what size of snippet is appropriate for mobile devices. Our findings suggest that users with long snippets on mobile devices exhibit longer search times with no better search accuracy for in-formational tasks. This is caused by the longer reading time, frequent scrolling with bigger viewport movements, and greater time consumption for searching and reading one result. The overall findings suggest that, unlike desktop users, mobile users are best served by snippets of two to three lines.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationCHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
    Pages97-106
    Number of pages10
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450346771
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 7 Mar 2017
    Event2nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2017 - Oslo, Norway
    Duration: 7 Mar 201711 Mar 2017

    Publication series

    NameCHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

    Conference

    Conference2nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2017
    Country/TerritoryNorway
    CityOslo
    Period7/03/1711/03/17

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