  The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has evolved significantly over the last
two decades, moving away from the simple ten blue links paradigm to
considerably more complex presentations that contain results from multiple
verticals and granularities of textual information. Prior works have
investigated how user interactions on the SERP are influenced by the presence
or absence of heterogeneous content (e.g., images, videos, or news content),
the layout of the SERP (list vs. grid layout), and task complexity. In this
paper, we reproduce the user studies conducted in prior works-specifically
those of Arguello et al. [4] and Siu and Chaparro [29]-to explore to what
extent the findings from research conducted five to ten years ago still hold
today as the average web user has become accustomed to SERPs with
ever-increasing presentational complexity. To this end, we designed and ran a
user study with four different SERP interfaces: (i) a heterogeneous grid; (ii)
a heterogeneous list; (iii) a simple grid; and (iv) a simple list. We collected
the interactions of 41 study participants over 12 search tasks for our
analyses. We observed that SERP types and task complexity affect user
interactions with search results. We also find evidence to support most (6 out
of 8) observations from [4 , 29] indicating that user interactions with
different interfaces and to solve tasks of different complexity have remained
mostly similar over time.
