An analysis of eye movements during browsing multiple search results pages

Abstract

In general, most search engines display a certain number of search results on a search results page at one time, separating the entire search results into multiple search results pages. Therefore, lower ranked results (e.g., 11th-ranked result) may be displayed on the top area of the next (second) page and might be more likely to be browsed by users, rather than results displayed on the bottom of the previous (first) results page. To better understand users' activities in web search, it is necessary to analyze the effect of display positions of search results while browsing multiple search results pages. In this paper, we present the results of our analysis of users' eye movements. We have conducted an experiment to measure eye movements during web search and analyzed how long users spend to view each search result. From the analysis results, we have found that search results displayed on the top of the latter page were viewed for a longer time than those displayed on the bottom of the former page. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.