Investigating characteristics of non-click behavior using query logs

Abstract

Users' query and click behavior information has been widely used in relevance feedback techniques to improve search engine performance. However, there is a special kind of user behavior that submitting a query but not clicking any result returned by search engines. Queries ending with non-click make up a large fraction of user search activities, but few studies on them have been done in user behavior analysis. In this paper we investigate non-click behavior using large scale search logs from a commercial search engine. We analyze query and non-click behavior characteristics on three levels, i.e., query, session and user level. Query frequency, search engine returned results and category of information need are observed to be relative to non-click behavior. There are significant differences between post-query actions of clicked and non-clicked queries. Users' personal preference can also results in non-click behavior. Our findings have implications for separating queries which are handled well or not by search engines and are useful in user behavior reliability study. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.