Title
An exploration of ranking heuristics in mobile local search
Abstract
Users increasingly rely on their mobile devices to search local entities, typically businesses, while on the go. Even though recent work has recognized that the ranking signals in mobile local search (e.g., distance and customer rating score of a business) are quite different from general Web search, they have mostly treated these signals as a black-box to extract very basic features (e.g., raw distance values and rating scores) without going inside the signals to understand how exactly they affect the relevance of a business. However, as it has been demonstrated in the development of general information retrieval models, it is critical to explore the underlying behaviors/heuristics of a ranking signal to design more effective ranking features. In this paper, we follow a data-driven methodology to study the behavior of these ranking signals in mobile local search using a large-scale query log. Our analysis reveals interesting heuristics that can be used to guide the exploitation of different signals. For example, users often take the mean value of a signal (e.g., rating) from the business result list as a "pivot" score, and tend to demonstrate different click behaviors on businesses with lower and higher signal values than the pivot; the clickrate of a business generally is sublinearly decreasing with its distance to the user, etc. Inspired by the understanding of these heuristics, we further propose different transformation methods to generate more effective ranking features. We quantify the improvement of the proposed new features using real mobile local search logs over a period of 14 months and show that the mean average precision can be improved by over 7%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2348283.2348325
SIGIR
Keywords
Field
DocType
mobile local search,different transformation method,real mobile local search,different signal,effective ranking feature,local entity,general web search,different click behavior,ranking signal,ranking heuristics,business result list,mean average precision,local search,heuristic search,mobile device
Data mining,Ranking SVM,Information retrieval,Mean value,Ranking,Computer science,Ranking (information retrieval),Mobile device,Heuristics,Artificial intelligence,Local search (optimization),Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.76
39
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuanhua Lv188736.48
Dimitrios K. Lymberopoulos21714109.98
Qiang Wu3150.76