Users and Contemporary SERPs: A (Re-)Investigation Examining User Interactions and Experiences
Nirmal Roy, David Maxwell, Claudia Hauff

TL;DR
This study revisits past research on user interactions with complex SERPs, finding that user behaviors have remained largely consistent despite evolving search result presentations.
Contribution
It replicates and updates previous user studies to assess if earlier findings still apply to modern, more complex SERP interfaces and user behaviors.
Findings
SERP type and task complexity influence user interactions
Most prior observations about user behavior remain valid today
User interaction patterns are consistent over time despite interface changes
Abstract
The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has evolved significantly over the last two decades, moving away from the simple ten blue links paradigm to considerably more complex presentations that contain results from multiple verticals and granularities of textual information. Prior works have investigated how user interactions on the SERP are influenced by the presence or absence of heterogeneous content (e.g., images, videos, or news content), the layout of the SERP (list vs. grid layout), and task complexity. In this paper, we reproduce the user studies conducted in prior works-specifically those of Arguello et al. [4] and Siu and Chaparro [29]-to explore to what extent the findings from research conducted five to ten years ago still hold today as the average web user has become accustomed to SERPs with ever-increasing presentational complexity. To this end, we designed and ran a user…
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