Augmenting web search surrogates with images

While images are commonly used in search result presentation for vertical domains such as shopping and news, web search results surrogates remain primarily text-based. In this paper, we present results of two large-scale user studies to examine the effects of augmenting text-based surrogates with images extracted from the underlying webpage. We evaluate effectiveness and efficiency at both the individual surrogate level and at the results page level. Additionally, we investigate the influence of two factors: the goodness of the image in terms of representing the underlying page content, and the diversity of the results on a results page. Our results show that at the individual surrogate level, good images provide only a small benefit in judgment accuracy versus text-only surrogates, with a slight increase in judgment time. At the results page level, surrogates with good images had similar effectiveness and efficiency compared to the text-only condition. However, in situations where the results page items had diverse senses, surrogates with images had higher click precision versus text-only ones. Results of these studies show tradeoffs in the use of images in web search surrogates, and highlight particular situations where they can provide benefits.