Beyond dwell time: estimating document relevance from cursor movements and other post-click searcher behavior

• Authors: Qi Guo;Eugene Agichtein
• Venue: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
• Year: 2012

Result clickthrough statistics and dwell time on clicked results have been shown valuable for inferring search result relevance, but the interpretation of these signals can vary substantially for different tasks and users. This paper shows that that post-click searcher behavior, such as cursor movement and scrolling, provides additional clues for better estimating document relevance. To this end, we identify patterns of examination and interaction behavior that correspond to viewing a relevant or non-relevant document, and design a new Post-Click Behavior (PCB) model to capture these patterns. To our knowledge, PCB is the first to successfully incorporate post-click searcher interactions such as cursor movements and scrolling on a landing page for estimating document relevance. We evaluate PCB on a dataset collected from a controlled user study that contains interactions gathered from hundreds of unique queries, result clicks, and page examinations. The experimental results show that PCB is significantly more effective than using page dwell time information alone, both for estimating the explicit judgments of each user, and for re-ranking the results using the estimated relevance.