Have you ever thought what makes you and other search engines users to choose one site from the search results or another? Well, even if you haven’t focused your attention on this before Yahoo has made it for you. Conducting a survey which became a patent application, Summary Attributes and Perceived Search Quality, Yahoo has determined some rules and clues to what parameters of the summary retrieved from the site make user choose it from among the other results and follow the link.

The experiment run by Yahoo included a number of summary quality estimation parameters such as Text Choppiness, Snippet Truncation, Query Term Presence, Query Term Density, Abstract Length and Genre.

The conclusions of the surveys were somehow unexpected. For example it is reported that the quiry term density and the snippet length didn’t affect the choice of users while text choppiness, truncation and genre statement had an effect on whether the site was chosen from the others or not.

The overall conclusions stated in the patent application are the following:

By manipulating particular attributes of search result summaries while asking users to indicate how well the results meet certain quality criteria, we have started to understand what users value in summaries.

We found that neither abstract length nor query term density had a significant effect on perceptions of quality when users read summaries, though we expect these factors play a role when users scan result pages, as eyetracking research suggests. On the other hand, text choppiness and truncation affected user ratings of several factors, not only readability (as one might expect), but also trust in the results and understanding why the page was retrieved.

Perhaps our most interesting finding was that providing genre cues in abstracts caused users to have a more favorable impression not only of how well the abstract conveyed the type of page expected but several other attributes as well. This “genre halo effect” increased how much users trusted the result and how likely they felt it would contain the information they were seeking.

Hope this research will help not only search engines to sophisticate their mechanisms but will help SEOs in their work also.

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