Investigating the Influence of Ads on User Search Performance, Behaviour, and Experience during Information Seeking

摘要: The phenomenon of banner blindness explains that users can mentally ignore online advertisements (ads). However, eye-tracking studies have shown still fixate on ads, and even without direct gaze, ads fall within a user's peripheral vision, which may negatively overload cognition. It is therefore unknown how blind, blindness, truly is, what other effect information seeking. To address this gap, within-subjects design experiment was conducted with 37 participants who performed search tasks from the TREC 2017 Common Core News Collection, where 3 contained various types one task had no ads. Although our results showed average, retrieved similar amounts relevant documents regardless whether were present or absent, took significantly longer achieving performance when present. Furthermore, reported less frustration, not only believed they learned more, but post-task recall test actually did learn up to 38% more. Consequently, findings suggest more costly than just mere annoyance, influence retrieval extend current theories visual crowding.