The Impact of Entity Cards on Learning-Oriented Search Tasks

Entity cards are a common occurrence in today's web Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SERPs provide information on a complex information object in a structured manner. Typically, they combine data from several search verticals. They have been shown to: (i) increase users' engagement with the SERP; and (ii) improve decision making for certain types of searches (such as health searches). In this paper, we investigate whether the benefits of showing entity cards also extend to the Search as Learning (SAL) domain. Do learners learn more when entity cards are present on the SERP? To answer this question, we designed a series of learning-oriented search tasks (with a minimum search time of 15 minutes), and conducted a crowdsourced Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) user study (N=144) with four interface conditions: (i) a control with no entity cards; (ii) displaying relevant entity cards; (iii) displaying somewhat relevant entity cards; and (iv) displaying non-relevant entity cards. Our results show that (i) entity cards do not have an effect on participants' learning, but (ii) they do significantly impact participants' search behaviours across a range of dimensions (such as the dwell time and search session duration).