Improving Search Results Quality by Customizing Summary Lengths

Web search engines today typically show results as a list of titles and short snippets that summarize how the retrieved documents are related to the query. However, recent research suggests that longer summaries can be preferable for certain types of queries. This paper presents empirical evidence that judges can predict appropriate search result summary lengths, and that perceptions of search result quality can be affected by varying these result lengths. These findings have important implications for search results presentation, especially for natural language queries.