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Optimizing the number of search result categories

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Automatically generated web search result categories were found to be beneficial in our previous study. In that study, we used 15 result categories and left the optimal number of categories issue deliberately untouched. To address this matter, we conducted a new experiment with 27 participants to compare search user interfaces with 10, 20, and 40 automatically generated categories. The results show that users prefer fewer categories. The use of fewer categories results in a slightly more accurate performance in result selection. In addition, the observed speed differences between the conditions were small. Although reading longer category lists requires more time, the users benefited from the increased descriptiveness, causing the overall speed to be almost equal. According to our results, the optimal number of categories is between 10 and 20.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
1358 pages
ISBN:1595930027
DOI:10.1145/1056808
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 ACM 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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Published: 02 April 2005

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Author Tags

  1. categorization
  2. clustering
  3. information access
  4. search user interface
  5. web search

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