Effect of Snippets on User Experience in Web Search

In recent years, the search engine results pages (SERP's) have been augmented with new markup elements that introduce seamlessly additional semantic information. Examples of such elements are the aggregated results disseminated by vertical portals, and the enriched snippets that display meta-information from the landing pages. In this paper, we investigate the gaze behaviour of web users who inter- act with SERP's that contain plain and rich snippets, and observe the impact of both types of snippets on the web search experience. For our study, we consider a wide range of snippet types, such as multimedia elements (Google Images, Google Videos), recommendation snippets (Author, Google Plus, Reviews, Google Shopping Product), and geo-location snippets (Google Places). We conduct two controlled user studies that employ eye tracking and mouse tracking, and analyse the search interactions of 213 participants, focusing on three factors: noticeability, interest, and conversion. Our findings indicate that ranking remains the most critical factor in relevance perception, although in certain cases the richness of snippets can capture user attention.