Bypass rates: reducing query abandonment using negative inferences

  • Authors:
  • Atish Das Sarma;Sreenivas Gollapudi;Samuel Ieong

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA;Microsoft Research, Mountain View, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

We introduce a new approach to analyzing click logs by examining both the documents that are clicked and those that are bypassed-documents returned higher in the ordering of the search results but skipped by the user. This approach complements the popular click-through rate analysis, and helps to draw negative inferences in the click logs. We formulate a natural objective that finds sets of results that are unlikely to be collectively bypassed by a typical user. This is closely related to the problem of reducing query abandonment. We analyze a greedy approach to optimizing this objective, and establish theoretical guarantees of its performance. We evaluate our approach on a large set of queries, and demonstrate that it compares favorably to the maximal marginal relevance approach on a number of metrics including mean average precision and mean reciprocal rank.