TY - GEN
T1 - What users do
T2 - 9th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference on Information Retrieval Technology, AIRS 2013
AU - Thomas, Paul
AU - Scholer, Falk
AU - Moffat, Alistair
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Search engine result pages - the ten blue links - are a staple of document retrieval services. The usual presumption is that users read these one-by-one from the top, making judgments about the usefulness of documents based on the snippets presented, accessing the underlying document when a snippet seems attractive, and then moving on to the next snippet. In this paper we re-examine this assumption, and present the results of a user experiment in which gaze-tracking is combined with click analysis. We conclude that in very general terms, users do indeed read from the top, but that at a detailed level there are complex behaviors evident, suggesting that a more sophisticated model of user interaction might be appropriate. In particular, we argue that users retain a number of snippets in an "active band" that shifts down the result page, and that reading and clicking activity tends to takes place within the band in a manner that is not strictly sequential.
AB - Search engine result pages - the ten blue links - are a staple of document retrieval services. The usual presumption is that users read these one-by-one from the top, making judgments about the usefulness of documents based on the snippets presented, accessing the underlying document when a snippet seems attractive, and then moving on to the next snippet. In this paper we re-examine this assumption, and present the results of a user experiment in which gaze-tracking is combined with click analysis. We conclude that in very general terms, users do indeed read from the top, but that at a detailed level there are complex behaviors evident, suggesting that a more sophisticated model of user interaction might be appropriate. In particular, we argue that users retain a number of snippets in an "active band" that shifts down the result page, and that reading and clicking activity tends to takes place within the band in a manner that is not strictly sequential.
KW - Retrieval evaluation
KW - user behavior
KW - user model
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893217113&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-45068-6_36
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-45068-6_36
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9783642450679
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 416
EP - 427
BT - Information Retrieval Technology - 9th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2013, Proceedings
Y2 - 9 December 2013 through 11 December 2013
ER -