Noam Tractinsky

Internet search engines typically compute a relevance score for webpages given the query terms, and then rank the pages by decreasing relevance scores. The popular search engines do not, however, present the relevance scores that were computed during this process. We suggest that these relevance scores may contain information that can help users make conscious decisions. In this paper we evaluate in a user study how users react to the display of such scores. The results indicate that users understand graphical displays of relevance, and make decisions based on these scores. Our results suggest that in the context of exploratory search, relevance scores may cause users to explore more search results.