Evaluating the Impact of Snippet Highlighting in Search

When viewing a list of search results, users see a snippet of text from each document. For an ambiguous query, the list may contain some documents that match the user's in- terpretation of the query and some that correspond to a completely dierent interpretation. We hypothesize that selectively highlighting important words in snippets may help users scan the list for relevant documents. This paper presents a lab experiment where we show the user a top-10 list, instructing them to look for a particular interpretation of an ambiguous query, and track the speed and accuracy of their clicks. We nd that under certain conditions, the additional highlighting improves the time to click without decreasing the user's ability to identify relevant documents.