Techniques for automatically generating and displaying topic-focused summaries for search results are disclosed. Users can “peek” inside a search result to see document excerpts that pertain specifically to a user-selected topic. Thus, a user can view the aspects of a document that are most interesting prior to deciding whether to retrieve the complete document. For each search result, a user can select from among several different available summaries, each of which focuses on a different topic of the document to which that search result refers. According to one aspect, key concepts are automatically identified in a document. For each such key concept, contextual snippets that pertain to that key concept are automatically selected. The key concepts are displayed to the user at search time. A summary that contains the contextual snippets that pertain to a user-selected key concept is displayed in response to the user's selection of that key concept.