Sebastiaan Vercammen graduates on displaying intermediate results for on-going searches

by Sebastiaan Vercammen

Distributed search introduces problems with resources that require time to process queries and produce results, and users waiting to get an answer to their query. The system could wait a maximum amount of time for every resource to produce its results or start displaying results the very moment they are retrieved by the distributed search engine. This thesis introduces a number of alternative display strategies and describes a method to research their effectiveness in providing the most relevant results, as quickly and as high in the combined results as possible, while maintaining a user-friendly search experience. It then continues by describing the performed research and its results. For each experiment, test participants are asked a number of questions, to describe their experience operating the search engine using the specific display strategy. Also recorded are statistics concerning test participants’ clicks. These metrics are combined with the answers to the user questions and also used for determining the best display strategy. Observations were made of aspects that seemed to have influenced the experiment, such as the red color of the notifications used for one of the display strategies. The precise influence of these aspects should be further studied, by using A/B testing, as proposed in section 7.2. Finally, the conclusion is drawn that the Screen fill with “endless” scrolling display strategy (section 3.3.4) performed best when taking the test participants’ answers into account.

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