The effect of aggregated search coherence on search behavior

  • Authors:

  • Jaime Arguello;Robert Capra

  • Affiliations:

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Aggregated search is the task of blending results from different specialized search services, or verticals, into the web search results. Aggregated search coherence refers to the degree to which results from different systems focus on similar senses of the query. While cross-component coherence has been cited as an important criterion for whole-page evaluation, its effect on search behavior has not been deeply investigated in prior research. In this work, we focus on the coherence between two aggregated search components: images and web results. In particular, we investigate whether the query-senses associated with the blended image results can influence user interaction with the web results. For example, if a user wants web results about "jaguar" the animal, are they more likely to examine the web results if the image results contain pictures of the animal instead of pictures of the car? Based on two large user studies, our results show that the image results can systematically affect user interaction with the web results. If the web results are largely consistent with the search task, then the effect of the image results is small. However, if the web results are only marginally consistent with the search task, such as when they are highly diversified across query-senses, the image results have a significant effect on user interaction with the web results. Our findings have implications on current research in whole-page evaluation, aggregated search, and diversity ranking.