Analysis of User Behavior for Web Search Success Using Eye Tracker Data

Abstract

Web log data has been the basis for analyzing user query session behavior for a number of years, but it has several important shortcomings. The main one being that we do not really know what the user is doing - is s/he looking at the screen or doing something else? We have conducted an Eye-Tracking study to analyze user behavior when searching the web and looking for specific information on results and content pages. The goal is to obtain more precise information about the search strategy of the user. Which characteristics make the difference between successful and unsuccessful searches? This research presents results focusing on the number of formulated queries by session, documents clicked, the fixation durations on the documents, and the distribution of the attention in the different areas of the screen, among other aspects.