SERP

Please consult Indexing the Collection before reading this page.

What we did
We have chosen to implement the design of Google for our Search Engine Result Page (SERP), because this design met all the requirements which Hearst sets for an excellent SERP. The design we've implemented prevents as complexity as much possible for all web users. Hearst also stresses the aesthetics of a SERP are important for user satisfaction, and Google has a simple but beautiful design. Google has spent millions of dollars on creating the best design possible, so it would be a shame to not put their research findings to use.

What works well
Hearst proposed a number of requirements for the display of search results, which we have met. When possible, we display all query terms in the document surrogate and we highlight the query terms (Keyword in Context), because research shows this makes it much easier for the user to quickly determine the relevancy of a document. Also, we have balanced the length of our KWIC descriptions; the summaries are long enough to give the right information and short enough to reduce scrolling to a minimum. We also chose to limit the paragraph length to three sentences. According to Hearst, it is unclear whether the use of sentence fragments improves the quality of the SERP, so we decided to display three consecutive sentences, which do have KWIC highlighting. The amount of results (also called: "hits") per page is set to 10, just like on every modern web search engine.

What has to be improved
According to Hearst, important metadata like date, author, URL and length could be displayed for each hit. However, we have chosen to display only the title and summary, because the metadata doesn't add much useful information in our case; it mostly adds complexity for the users. The author is the same for most of the hits (in most cases it's Eberhard van der Laan), the domain referred to is the same for all hits (so we don't display the URL) and the date of the letter is not very relevant in this scenario. This lack of this information could be seen as a disadvantage of our search engine, but we believe we did the right thing by leaving it off the page.

Evaluation of quality
We believe we have a very strong SERP. Because we have implemented nearly all of Hearst's recommendations (like KWIC descriptions and pagination), our SERP is easy to understand and provides just the right amount of information: not too much, but not too little either. Also, it looks nice, which is also an important factor in user satisfaction. Hearst would be proud ;-).