User browsing models: relevance versus examination

There has been considerable work on user browsing models for search engine results, both organic and sponsored. The click-through rate (CTR) of a result is the product of the probability of examination (will the user look at the result) times the perceived relevance of the result (probability of a click given examination). Past papers have assumed that when the CTR of a result varies based on the pattern of clicks in prior positions, this variation is solely due to changes in the probability of examination. We show that, for sponsored search results, a substantial portion of the change in CTR when conditioned on prior clicks is in fact due to a change in the relevance of results for that query instance, not just due to a change in the probability of examination. We then propose three new user browsing models, which attribute CTR changes solely to changes in relevance, solely to changes in examination (with an enhanced model of user behavior), or to both changes in relevance and examin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Ramakrishnan Srikant, Sugato Basu, Ni Wang, Daryl Pregibon
• Keywords: Click Given Examination, Ctr Change, Data Mining, KDD 2010, User Browsing Models