What Users Do: The Eyes Have It

TLDR: It is argued that users retain a number of snippets in an “active band” that shifts down the result page, and that reading and clicking activity tends to takes place within the band in a manner that is not strictly sequential.

Abstract: Search engine result pages – the ten blue links – are a staple of document retrieval services. The usual presumption is that users read these one-by-one from the top, making judgments about the usefulness of documents based on the snippets presented, accessing the underlying document when a snippet seems attractive, and then moving on to the next snippet. In this paper we re-examine this assumption, and present the results of a user experiment in which gaze-tracking is combined with click analysis. We conclude that in very general terms, users do indeed read from the top, but that at a detailed level there are complex behaviors evident, suggesting that a more sophisticated model of user interaction might be appropriate. In particular, we argue that users retain a number of snippets in an “active band” that shifts down the result page, and that reading and clicking activity tends to takes place within the band in a manner that is not strictly sequential.