Live web search experiments for the rest of us

Timothy Jones*, David Hawking, Ramesh Sankaranarayana

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    1 Citation (Scopus)

    Abstract

    There are significant barriers to academic research into user Web search preferences. Academic researchers are unable to manipulate the results shown by a major search engine to users and would have no access to the interaction data collected by the engine. Our initial approach to overcoming this was to ask participants to submit queries to an experimental search engine rather than their usual search tool. Over several different experiments we found that initial user buy-in was high but that people quickly drifted back to their old habits and stopped contributing data. Here, we report our investigation of possible reasons why this occurs. An alternative approach is exemplified by the Lemur browser toolbar, which allows local collection of user interaction data from search engine sessions, but does not allow result pages to be modified. We will demonstrate a new Firefox toolbar that we have developed to support experiments in which search results may be arbitrarily manipulated. Using our toolbar, academics can set up the experiments they want to conduct, while collecting (subject to human experimentation guidelines) queries, clicks and dwell times as well as optional explicit judgments.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '10
    Pages1265-1268
    Number of pages4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2010
    Event19th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2010 - Raleigh, NC, United States
    Duration: 26 Apr 201030 Apr 2010

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '10

    Conference

    Conference19th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2010
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityRaleigh, NC
    Period26/04/1030/04/10

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