Know Your Onions

The increasing availability of large volumes of human-curated content is shifting web search towards a paradigm that introduces seamlessly more semantic information to search engine result pages. This trend has resulted in the design of a new element known as the knowledge module (KM) where certain facts about named entities, obtained from various knowledge bases, are shown to users. So far, little has been done to uncover the role that this module plays on user experience in web search and whether it is perceived by users as a useful aid for their search tasks. Our work is an early attempt to bridge this gap. To this end, we conducted a crowdsourcing study aimed at understanding the effect of the KM on users' search experience and its overall utility. In particular, our study is the first to provide insights about the noticeability and usefulness of the KM in web search, together with comprehensive analyses of usability and workload.