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What are you looking for?: an eye-tracking study of information usage in web search

Published: 29 April 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for better presentation of search results.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2007
    1654 pages
    ISBN:9781595935939
    DOI:10.1145/1240624
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 29 April 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. contextual snippets
    2. eye tracking
    3. user studies
    4. web search

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    April 28 - May 3, 2007
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    CHI '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 182 of 840 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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