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Investigating Examination Behavior in Mobile Search

Published: 22 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Examination is one of the most important user interactions in Web search. A number of works studied examination behavior in Web search and helped researchers better understand how users allocate their attention on search engine result pages (SERPs). Compared to desktop search, mobile search has a number of differences such as fewer results on the screen. These differences bring in mobile-specific factors affecting users' examination behavior. However, there still lacks research on users' attention allocation mechanism via viewports in mobile search. Therefore, we design a lab-based study to collect user's rich interaction behavior in mobile search. Based on the collected data, we first analyze how users examine SERPs and allocate their attention to heterogeneous results. Then we investigate the effect of mobile-specific factors and other common factors on users allocating attention. Finally, we apply the findings of user attention allocation from the user study into click model construction efforts, which significantly improves the state-of-the-art click model. Our work brings insights into a better understanding of users' interaction patterns in mobile search and may benefit other mobile search-related research.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WSDM '20: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
January 2020
950 pages
ISBN:9781450368223
DOI:10.1145/3336191
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 22 January 2020

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Author Tags

  1. examination behavior
  2. eye tracking
  3. mobile search
  4. mobile viewport

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • National Key Research and Devel- opment Program of China
  • Natural Science Foundation of China

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WSDM '20

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Overall Acceptance Rate 498 of 2,863 submissions, 17%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Mobile search made easier: An ability-based mobile search prototype for people with dyslexiaProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638292(45-55)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2024)A Self-Learning Framework for Large-Scale Conversational AI SystemsIEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine10.1109/MCI.2024.336397119:2(34-48)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Probabilistic graph model and neural network perspective of click models for web searchKnowledge and Information Systems10.1007/s10115-024-02145-z66:10(5829-5873)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2024
  • (2023)A Passage-Level Reading Behavior Model for Mobile SearchProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583343(3236-3246)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Behavior Modeling for Point of Interest SearchProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591955(1843-1847)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2023)ITran: A novel transformer-based approach for industrial anomaly detection and localizationEngineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence10.1016/j.engappai.2023.106677125(106677)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2022)From linear to non-linear: investigating the effects of right-rail results on complex SERPsAdvances in Computational Intelligence10.1007/s43674-021-00028-22:1Online publication date: 10-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Privacy-Aware Remote Information Retrieval User Experiments Logging ToolProceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3404835.3462793(2615-2619)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Investigating Fine-Grained Usefulness Perception Process in Mobile SearchInformation Retrieval10.1007/978-3-030-56725-5_2(17-28)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2020

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