New Scientist Tech reports that a new tool examines the cursor behavior of search-engine users to decide if they are shopping or merely surfing, based on how users react to sponsored results displayed above the non-sponsored ones, which can be annoying for someone who's not shopping, say Eugene Agichtein and Qi Guo at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
People often use cursor moves to help them pick their way through a screen of text, so the pair wondered if these could be analysed to discern if a person was reading the sponsored ad or not, and so infer their intention. They created a Web browser add-on that tracks the cursor, and found that the data could help to distinguish between a "browsing" and "shopping" search session over 96 per cent of the time.
Users often reword their query several times in a search session, so surmising propensity to purchase can help to determine whether or not it is appropriate to display ads in later searches, Agichtein says. "As the session progresses, our system would be able to make increasingly accurate predictions of intent."
The pair will present their study at the SIGIR 2010 conference in Geneva, Switzerland, this month.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment