Current web search engines return result pages containing mostly text summary even though the matched web pages may contain informative pictures. A text excerpt (i.e. snippet) is generated by selecting keywords around the matched query terms for each returned page to provide context for user's relevance judgment. However, in many scenarios, we found that the pictures in web pages, if selected properly, could be added into search result pages and provide richer contextual description because a picture is worth a thousand words. Such new summary is named as image excerpts. By well designed user study, we demonstrate image excerpts can help users make much quicker relevance judgment of search results for a wide range of query types. To implement this idea, we propose a practicable approach to automatically generate image excerpts in the result pages by considering the dominance of each picture in each web page and the relevance of the picture to the query. We also outline an efficient way to incorporate image excerpts in web search engines. Web search engines can adopt our approach by slightly modifying their index and inserting a few low cost operations in their workflow. Our experiments on a large web dataset indicate the performance of the proposed approach is very promising.
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