Studying the use of popular destinations to enhance web search interaction

ABSTRACT

We present a novel Web search interaction feature which, for a given query, provides links to websites frequently visited by other users with similar information needs. These popular destinations complement traditional search results, allowing direct navigation to authoritative resources for the query topic. Destinations are identified using the history of search and browsing behavior of many users over an extended time period, whose collective behavior provides a basis for computing source authority. We describe a user study which compared the suggestion of destinations with the previously proposed suggestion of related queries, as well as with traditional, unaided Web search. Results show that search enhanced by destination suggestions outperforms other systems for exploratory tasks, with best performance obtained from mining past user behavior at query-level granularity.

REFERENCES

• 1: Eugene Agichtein , Eric Brill , Susan Dumais, Improving web search ranking by incorporating user behavior information, Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 06-11, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1148170.1148177]
• 2: Anderson, C. et al. (2001). Adaptive Web navigation for wireless devices. In Proc. IJCAI, 879--884.
• 3: Peter Anick, Using terminological feedback for web search refinement: a log-based study, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860453]
• 4: Beaulieu, M. (1997). Experiments with interfaces to support query expansion. J. Doc. 53, 1, 8--19.
• 5: Borlund, P. (2000). Experimental components for the evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems. J. Doc. 56, 1, 71--90.
• 6: Downey et al. (2007). Models of searching and browsing: languages, studies and applications. In Proc. IJCAI, 1465--72.
• 7: Dumais, S.T. & Belkin, N.J. (2005). The TREC interactive tracks: putting the user into search. In Voorhees, E. M. and Harman, D. K. (eds.) TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 123--153.
• 8: George W. Furnas, Experience with an adaptive indexing scheme, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.131-135, April 1985, San Francisco, California, United States
• 9: Andrew Hickl , Patrick Wang , John Lehmann , Sanda Harabagiu, FERRET: interactive question-answering for real-world environments, Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Interactive presentation sessions, p.25-28, July 17-18, 2006, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.3115/1225403.1225410]
• 10: Rosie Jones , Benjamin Rey , Omid Madani , Wiley Greiner, Generating query substitutions, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1135835]
• 11: Jürgen Koenemann , Nicholas J. Belkin, A case for interaction: a study of interactive information retrieval behavior and effectiveness, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.205-212, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238487]
• 12: Vicki L. O'Day , Robin Jeffries, Orienteering in an information landscape: how information seekers get from here to there, Proceedings of the INTERCHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.438-445, May 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 13: Filip Radlinski , Thorsten Joachims, Query chains: learning to rank from implicit feedback, Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data mining, August 21-24, 2005, Chicago, Illinois, USA [doi>10.1145/1081870.1081899]
• 14: Gerard Salton , Christopher Buckley, Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.24 n.5, p.513-523, 1988 [doi>10.1016/0306-4573(88)90021-0]
• 15: Craig Silverstein , Hannes Marais , Monika Henzinger , Michael Moricz, Analysis of a very large web search engine query log, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.33 n.1, p.6-12, Fall 1999 [doi>10.1145/331403.331405]
• 16: Barry Smyth , Evelyn Balfe , Jill Freyne , Peter Briggs , Maurice Coyle , Oisin Boydell, Exploiting Query Repetition and Regularity in an Adaptive Community-Based Web Search Engine, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.14 n.5, p.383-423, January 2005 [doi>10.1007/s11257-004-5270-4]
• 17: Amanda Spink , Seda Ozmutlu , Huseyin C. Ozmutlu , Bernard J Jansen, U.S. versus European web searching trends, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.36 n.2, Fall 2002 [doi>10.1145/792550.792555]
• 18: Amanda Spink , Minsoo Park , Bernard J. Jansen , Jan Pedersen, Multitasking during web search sessions, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.42 n.1, p.264-275, January 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.ipm.2004.10.004]
• 19: Alan Wexelblat , Pattie Maes, Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.270-277, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.303060]
• 20: Ryen W. White , Steven M. Drucker, Investigating behavioral variability in web search, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1242572.1242576]
• 21: Ryen W. White , Gary Marchionini, Examining the effectiveness of real-time query expansion, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.43 n.3, p.685-704, May, 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.ipm.2006.06.005]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
enhanced web search, search destinations, user studies