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How many results per page?: A Study of SERP Size, Search Behavior and User Experience

Authors:

Leif AzzopardiAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '15: Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Pages 183 - 192

https://doi.org/10.1145/2766462.2767732

Published: 09 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The provision of "ten blue links" has emerged as the standard for the design of search engine result pages (SERPs). While numerous aspects of SERPs have been examined, little attention has been paid to the number of results displayed per page. This paper investigates the relationships among the number of results shown on a SERP, search behavior and user experience. We performed a laboratory experiment with 36 subjects, who were randomly assigned to use one of three search interfaces that varied according to the number of results per SERP (three, six or ten). We found subjects' click distributions differed significantly depending on SERP size. We also found those who interacted with three results per page viewed significantly more SERPs per query; interestingly, the number of SERPs they viewed per query corresponded to about 10 search results. Subjects who interacted with ten results per page viewed and saved significantly more documents. They also reported the greatest difficulty finding relevant documents, rated their skills the lowest and reported greater workload, even though these differences were not significant. This work shows that behavior changes with SERP size, such that more time is spent focused on earlier results when SERP size decreases.

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Cited By

Vidal-Sepúlveda MOlivares-Rodríguez C(2024)Mediación algorítmica: sesgos en la búsqueda de información en estudiantes universitariosEuropean Public & Social Innovation Review10.31637/epsir-2024-3979(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir-2024-397
Pathak KAzzopardi LHalvey M(2024)The Influence of Presentation and Performance on User SatisfactionProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638335(77-86)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638335
Kameni JBatchakui BNkambou R(2024)Optimization of Information Retrieval Systems for Learning ContextsInternational Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/s40593-024-00415-zOnline publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-024-00415-z
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

How many results per page?: A Study of SERP Size, Search Behavior and User Experience
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGIR '15: Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

August 2015

1198 pages

ISBN:9781450336215

DOI:10.1145/2766462

General Chair:
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo Labs, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Mounia Lalmas
Yahoo Labs, UK
,
Alistair Moffat
University of Melbourne, Australia
,
Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
Google, Brazil, and UFMG, Brazil

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGIR: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 09 August 2015

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SIGIR '15

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SIGIR

SIGIR '15: The 38th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval

August 9 - 13, 2015

Santiago, Chile

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SIGIR '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 70 of 351 submissions, 20%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Vidal-Sepúlveda MOlivares-Rodríguez C(2024)Mediación algorítmica: sesgos en la búsqueda de información en estudiantes universitariosEuropean Public & Social Innovation Review10.31637/epsir-2024-3979(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir-2024-397
Pathak KAzzopardi LHalvey M(2024)The Influence of Presentation and Performance on User SatisfactionProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638335(77-86)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638335
Kameni JBatchakui BNkambou R(2024)Optimization of Information Retrieval Systems for Learning ContextsInternational Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education10.1007/s40593-024-00415-zOnline publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-024-00415-z
Parry AFröbe MMacAvaney SPotthast MHagen M(2024)Analyzing Adversarial Attacks on Sequence-to-Sequence Relevance ModelsAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56060-6_19(286-302)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56060-6_19
McGregor MAzzopardi LHalvey M(2023)A Systematic Review of Cost, Effort, and Load Research in Information Search and Retrieval, 1972–2020ACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/358306942:1(1-39)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
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Zou JAliannejadi MKanoulas EPera MLiu Y(2023)Users Meet Clarifying Questions: Toward a Better Understanding of User Interactions for Search ClarificationACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/352411041:1(1-25)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
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Beaumont JCook N(2023)Analysis of types of and language used in online information available to patients with periodontitisBritish Dental Journal10.1038/s41415-023-5525-2234:4(253-258)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2023
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Zou JSun ALong CAliannejadi MKanoulas E(2023)Asking Clarifying Questions: To benefit or to disturb users in Web search?Information Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2022.10317660:2(103176)Online publication date: Mar-2023
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Allen GBeijen MMaxwell DGadiraju U(2023)In a Hurry: How Time Constraints and the Presentation of Web Search Results Affect User Behaviour and ExperienceWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-34444-2_16(221-235)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2023
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