Two scrolls or one click: A cost model for browsing search results

Abstract

Modeling how people interact with search interfaces has been of particular interest and importance to the field of Interactive Information Retrieval. Recently, there has been a move to developing formal models of the interaction between the user and the system, whether it be to run a simulation, conduct an economic analysis, measure system performance, or simply to better understand the interactions. In this paper, we present a cost model that characterizes a user examining search results. The model shows under what conditions the interface should be more scroll based or more click based and provides ways to estimate the number of results per page based on the size of the screen and the various interaction costs. Further extensions to the model could be easily included to model different types of browsing and other costs.