Don’t Judge by Looks: Search User Interface to Make Searchers Reflect on Their Relevance Criteria and Promote Content-Quality-Oriented Web Searches

Searchers often judge the webpage quality by the visual appearance, even for tasks where the content quality is more important such as health information. We propose a search user interface (UI) that makes searchers reflect on their webpage selection criteria and promote content-quality-oriented web searches regardless of visual appearances. The proposed UI visualizes how often searchers have browsed high-quality webpages during a search session. It does not explicitly tell the searcher that a high-quality webpage means high content quality; instead, the searcher is expected to reflect on their relevance criteria and improve their search behavior towards careful information seeking by considering the relationship between their page selection and the visualized score on the UI. We conducted an online user study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed UI, and the results indicated that participants without a university education tended to focus on the content quality of webpages and browsed higher-quality pages with the proposed UI than with a conventional UI.