do thumbnail previews help users make better relevance decisions about web search results?
We describe an empirical evaluation of the utility of thumbnail previews in web search results. Results pages were constructed to show text-only summaries, thumbnail previews only, or the combination of text summaries and thumbnail previews. We found that in the combination case, users were able to make more accurate decisions about the potential relevance of results than in either of the other versions, with hardly any increase in speed of processing the page as a whole.
thumbnails help users relevance web search empirical evaluation utility paging text combinational case version process search engine