Paper Info
Title
Using clicks as implicit judgments: expectations versus observations
Abstract
Clickthrough data has been the subject of increasing popularity as an implicit indicator of user feedback. Previous analysis has suggested that user click behaviour is subject to a quality bias--that is, users click at different rank positions when viewing effective search results than when viewing less effective search results. Based on this observation, it should be possible to use click data to infer the quality of the underlying search system. In this paper we carry out a user study to systematically investigate how click behaviour changes for different levels of search system effectiveness as measured by information retrieval performance metrics. Our results show that click behaviour does not vary systematically with the quality of search results. However, click behaviour does vary significantly between individual users, and between search topics. This suggests that using direct click behaviour--click rank and click frequency--to infer the quality of the underlying search system is problematic. Further analysis of our user click data indicates that the correspondence between clicks in a search result list and subsequent confirmation that the clicked resource is actually relevant is low. Using clicks as an implicit indication of relevance should therefore be done with caution.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_6
ECIR
Keywords
Field
DocType
underlying search system,direct click behaviour,click behaviour,search topic,search system effectiveness,user click behaviour,implicit judgment,user click data,search result list,search result,effective search result,information retrieval
Information retrieval,Computer science,Popularity,Click path
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
4956
0302-9743
3-540-78645-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
18
0.70
15
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Falk Scholer1124493.27
Milad Shokouhi2110950.63
Bodo Billerbeck327214.24
Andrew Turpin4134786.28