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A comparison of the use of text summaries, plain thumbnails, and enhanced thumbnails for Web search tasks

2001; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/asi.10029

1532-2890

Allison Woodruff, Ruth Rosenholtz, Julie Bauer Morrison, Andrew Faulring, Peter Pirolli,

Educational Strategies and Epistemologies

Abstract We introduce a technique for creating novel, enhanced thumbnails of Web pages. These thumbnails combine the advantages of plain thumbnails and text summaries to provide consistent performance on a variety of tasks. We conducted a study in which participants used three different types of summaries (enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries) to search Web pages to find several different types of information. Participants took an average of 67, 86, and 95 seconds to find the answer with enhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and text summaries, respectively. As expected, there was a strong effect of question category. For some questions, text summaries outperformed plain thumbnails, while for other questions, plain thumbnails outperformed text summaries. Enhanced thumbnails (which combine the features of text summaries and plain thumbnails) had more consistent performance than either text summaries or plain thumbnails, having for all categories the best performance or performance that was statistically indistinguishable from the best.