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No search result left behind: branching behavior with browser tabs

Published: 08 February 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Today's Web browsers allow users to open links in new windows or tabs. This action, which we call 'branching', is sometimes performed on search results when the user plans to eventually visit multiple results. We detect branching behavior on a large commercial search engine with a client-side script on the results page. Two-fifths of all users spawned new tabs on search results in the timeframe of our study; branching usage varied with different query types and vertical. Both branching and backtracking are viable methods for visiting multiple search results. To understand user search strategies, we treat multiple result clicks following a query as ordered events to understand user search strategies. Users branching in a query are more likely to click search results from top to bottom, while users who backtrack are less likely to do so; this is especially true for queries involving more than two clicks. These findings inform an experiment in which we take a popular click model and modify it to account for the differing user behavior when branching. By understanding that users continue examining search results before viewing a branched result, we can improve the click model for branching queries.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WSDM '12: Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
February 2012
792 pages
ISBN:9781450307475
DOI:10.1145/2124295
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 February 2012

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Author Tags

  1. browser tabs
  2. click models
  3. examining search results

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  • (2022)Experience: Analyzing Missing Web Page Visits and Unintentional Web Page Visits from the Client-side Web LogsJournal of Data and Information Quality10.1145/349039214:2(1-17)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2022
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