Investigating characteristics of non-click behavior using query logs

Ting Yao, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma, Yongfeng Zhang, Liyun Ru

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Users' query and click behavior information has been widely used in relevance feedback techniques to improve search engine performance. However, there is a special kind of user behavior that submitting a query but not clicking any result returned by search engines. Queries ending with non-click make up a large fraction of user search activities, but few studies on them have been done in user behavior analysis. In this paper we investigate non-click behavior using large scale search logs from a commercial search engine. We analyze query and non-click behavior characteristics on three levels, i.e., query, session and user level. Query frequency, search engine returned results and category of information need are observed to be relative to non-click behavior. There are significant differences between post-query actions of clicked and non-clicked queries. Users' personal preference can also results in non-click behavior. Our findings have implications for separating queries which are handled well or not by search engines and are useful in user behavior reliability study.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationInformation Retrieval Technology - 6th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2010, Proceedings
Pages85-96
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event6th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2010 - Taipei, Taiwan, Province of China
Duration: Dec 1 2010Dec 3 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6458 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other6th Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference, AIRS 2010
Country/TerritoryTaiwan, Province of China
CityTaipei
Period12/1/1012/3/10

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

Keywords

  • Non-click behavior
  • click-through log
  • query session analysis

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Investigating characteristics of non-click behavior using query logs'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this