Nonlinear Composite Search Results.

Modern search engines aggregate information from a variety of sources (e.g. images, videos) and return this information to users, merged into a single results page. Various novel interface elements have been added to the results page to help users access diverse content, from interactive aggregated search blocks to contextual entity cards. These novel elements merge various types of media into coherent objects displayed on the results page. We define these elements as composite search results and study methods to construct them, as well as their effect on user search behaviour. Our findings suggest that result composition can be an effective search paradigm and that nonlinear composite results can positively impact search behaviour in certain contexts.