Queries without Clicks: Successful or Failed Searches?
Sofia Stamou, Efthimis N. Efthimiadis · 2009
The critical aspect in the evaluation of retrieval effectiveness is the satisfaction of the user needs in the retrieved results. Current efforts for evaluating retrieval performance rely either on explicit user feedback or on the analysis of the search transaction logs in order to elicit the user needs and thus be able to infer their satisfaction in the retrieved results. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the user satisfaction from searches not followed by clickthrough activity on the retrieved results. To that end, we carried out a user study in order to identify the search intentions of queries without follow-up clicks. Our findings indicate that queries without clicks may pursue specific search goals that can be satisfied in the list of retrieved results the user views rather than in the contents of the documents the user visits for the query.