A Study of Snippet Length and Informativeness: Behaviour, Performance and User Experience
A Study of Snippet Length and Informativeness: Behaviour, Performance and User Experience
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片段长度和信息量的研究：行为、性能和用户体验
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
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通讯作者：
Yashar Moshfeghi
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作者：
David Maxwell;L. Azzopardi;Yashar Moshfeghi
搜索引擎结果页面（SERP）的设计和呈现一直受到很多研究。随着SERP的许多当代方面现在受到审查，工作仍然停留在调查更传统的SERP组件，如结果摘要。以前的研究已经检查了各种不同方面的结果摘要，但在本文中，我们调查结果摘要长度对搜索行为，性能和用户体验的影响。为此，我们使用TREC AQUAINT新闻集设计并进行了一项有53名参与者的受试者内实验。使用Kullback-Leibler距离作为信息增益的度量，我们检查了不同长度的结果摘要，并选择了信息增益变化最大的四种情况：（i）仅标题;（ii）标题加一个片段;（iii）标题加两个片段;（iv）标题加四个片段。研究结果表明，参与者普遍喜欢较长的结果摘要，因为它们被认为是更翔实的。然而，他们在正确识别相关文件方面的表现在所有四种情况下都是相似的。此外，虽然参与者认为较长的摘要信息量更大，但经验观察表明并非如此;虽然参与者更有可能点击较长摘要的相关项目，但他们也更有可能点击不相关的项目。这表明，越长不一定越好，尽管参与者认为情况就是这样-其次，他们揭示了摘要的长度和信息量与其吸引力（即点击率）之间的正相关关系。这些研究结果表明，在设计需要考虑的结果摘要时，感知和性能之间存在紧张关系。
The design and presentation of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has been subject to much research. With many contemporary aspects of the SERP now under scrutiny, work still remains in investigating more traditional SERP components, such as the result summary. Prior studies have examined a variety of different aspects of result summaries, but in this paper we investigate the influence of result summary length on search behaviour, performance and user experience. To this end, we designed and conducted a within-subjects experiment using the TREC AQUAINT news collection with 53 participants. Using Kullback-Leibler distance as a measure of information gain, we examined result summaries of different lengths and selected four conditions where the change in information gain was the greatest: (i) title only; (ii) title plus one snippet; (iii) title plus two snippets; and (iv) title plus four snippets. Findings show that participants broadly preferred longer result summaries, as they were perceived to be more informative. However, their performance in terms of correctly identifying relevant documents was similar across all four conditions. Furthermore, while the participants felt that longer summaries were more informative, empirical observations suggest otherwise; while participants were more likely to click on relevant items given longer summaries, they also were more likely to click on non-relevant items. This shows that longer is not necessarily better, though participants perceived that to be the case - and second, they reveal a positive relationship between the length and informativeness of summaries and their attractiveness (i.e. clickthrough rates). These findings show that there are tensions between perception and performance when designing result summaries that need to be taken into account.