What Users Do: The Eyes Have It

Abstract

Search engine result pages - the ten blue links - are a staple of document retrieval services. The usual presumption is that users read these one-by-one from the top, making judgments about the usefulness of documents based on the snippets presented, accessing the underlying document when a snippet seems attractive, and then moving on to the next snippet. In this paper we re-examine this assumption, and present the results of a user experiment in which gaze-tracking is combined with click analysis. We conclude that in very general terms, users do indeed read from the top, but that at a detailed level there are complex behaviors evident, suggesting that a more sophisticated model of user inte..