Users of Web search engines report two main problems: an insufficient number of relevant results and the mixing of relevant results with irrelevant results. Therefore, this research investigates the effects of query ambiguity and three forms of sorting search results on user performance and preference. Forty-eight Web search engine users evaluated three forms of sorting results. For each task, the query was a single term that had one, two, or three meanings. The results indicated that the preferred results sorting method was affected by the page number of the correct results. When the correct results were all located on the same page (i.e., the first page), the participants preferred the Ranking, Disambiguating, and Categories methods when the query term had one, two and three meanings, respectively. When the correct results were not on the first page, the test participants preferred the Categories sorting method for all number of query meanings.
The Matter of Chance: Auditing Web Search Results Related to the 2020 U.S. Presidential Primary Elections Across Six Search Engines
