The importance of sources in the selection of online newspaper articles: a study of Google Noticias using eye-tracking

This paper presents the results of a study of the news search engine Google News to determine the degree of importance users lend to headlines, sources and summaries as these appear in the lists of search results. By use of eye-tracking, researchers tallied the duration of the gaze of fifty users viewing search results displays to determine which of these elements captured their attention longest. The results indicate that more attention is paid to sources than to the summaries; whilethere are no significant differences between time spent viewing sources versus the title, indicating that online media users also consider the sources when deciding which articles to pursue.