The influence of caption features on clickthrough patterns in web search
Abstract
Web search engines present lists of captions, comprising title, snippet, and URL, to help users decide which search results to visit. Understanding the influence of features of these captions on Web search behavior may help validate algorithms and guidelines for their improved generation. In this paper we develop a methodology to use clickthrough logs from a commercial search engine to study user behavior when interacting with search result captions. The findings of our study suggest that relatively simple caption features such as the presence of all terms query terms, the readability of the snippet, and the length of the URL shown in the caption, can significantly influence users' Web search behavior.
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Cites
Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback
Joachims, T., Granka, L., Pan, B., Hembrooke, H., & Gay, G. (2005) · Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval · doi:10.1145/1076034.1076063 · Cited by 1,408 · see citing works
What are you looking for?: an eye-tracking study of information usage in web search
Cutrell, E., & Guan, Z. (2007) · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/1240624.1240690 · Cited by 460 · see citing works
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Captions and biases in diagnostic search
White, R. W., & Horvitz, E. (2013) · ACM Transactions on the Web · doi:10.1145/2486040 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
Self-citationA Mixed-Method Analysis of Text and Audio Search Interfaces with Varying Task Complexity
Vtyurina, A., Clarke, C. L. A., Law, E., Trippas, J. R., & Bota, H. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGIR on International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/3409256.3409822 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
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- Authors
- Clarke, C. L. A., Agichtein, E., Dumais, S., & White, R. W.
- Affiliations
- University of Waterloo (CA)
- Emory University (US)
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2007-07-23
- Pages
- 135-142
- OpenAlex
- W2153253904
- Cited by
- 119
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 11 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 6.30
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Microsoft Research
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Recommender Systems and Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web Data Mining and Analysis
- Keywords
- search result snippets, URL length, readability, user behavior
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