Effectiveness of Temporal Snippets

We introduce the notion of time-centered snippets, called TSnippet, as document surrogates for document retrieval and exploration. We propose an alternative document snippet based on temporal information that can be useful for supporting exploratory search. The idea of using sentences that contain the most frequent chronons (units of time) can be used for constructing document surrogates. We conducted a series of experiments to evaluate this new approach using a crowdsourcing approach. The evaluation against two Web search engines shows that our technique produces good snippets and users like to see time-sensitive information in search results.