Title
Leaving so soon?: understanding and predicting web search abandonment rationales
Abstract
Users of search engines often abandon their searches. Despite the high frequency of Web search abandonment and its importance to Web search engines, little is known about why searchers abandon beyond that it can be for good or bad reasons. In this paper, we ex-tend previous work by studying search abandonment using both a retrospective survey and an in-situ method that captures aban-donment rationales at abandonment time. We show that although satisfaction is a common motivator for abandonment, one-in-five abandonment instances does not relate to satisfaction. We also studied the automatic prediction of the underlying reason for ob-served abandonment. We used features of the query and the results, interaction with the result page (e.g., cursor movements, scrolling, clicks), and the full search session. We show that our classifiers can learn to accurately predict the reasons for observed search abandonment. Such accurate predictions help search providers estimate user satisfaction for queries without clicks, affording a more complete understanding of search engine performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2396761.2398399
CIKM
Keywords
Field
DocType
search abandonment,search engine performance,web search abandonment,search provider,web search engine,abandonment time,full search session,search engine,ob-served abandonment,observed search abandonment,web search abandonment rationale
Data mining,World Wide Web,Search engine,Information retrieval,Computer science,Scrolling,Cursor (user interface)
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
38
1.11
27
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Abdigani Diriye11187.40
Ryen White24546222.75
Georg Buscher377540.23
Susan Dumais4139482130.47