TY - GEN
T1 - What snippet size is needed in mobile web search?
AU - Kim, Jaewon
AU - Thomasx, Paul
AU - Sankaranarayana, Ramesh
AU - Gedeony, Tom
AU - Yoon, Hwan Jin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.
PY - 2017/3/7
Y1 - 2017/3/7
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Mobile web search
KW - Search engine result page
KW - Snippet length
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016953805&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3020165.3020173
DO - 10.1145/3020165.3020173
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - CHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
SP - 97
EP - 106
BT - CHIIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2017
Y2 - 7 March 2017 through 11 March 2017
ER -