Publication
Individual differences in gaze patterns for web search
Susan Dumais; Georg Buscher; Edward Cutrell
In: IIiX '10: Proceedings of the third Symposium on Information Interaction in Context. Information Interaction in Context Symposium (IIiX-10), August 18-22, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, ISBN 978-1-4503-0247-0, ACM Press, 2010.
Abstract
We investigate how people interact with Web search engine result pages
using eye-tracking, to provide a detailed understanding of the patterns
of user attention. Previous research has examined the visual attention
devoted to the 10 organic search results, and we extend this by also
examining how gaze is distributed across other components of contemporary
search engines, such as ads and related searches. This provides insights
about searcher's interactions with the "whole page", and not just
individual components. In addition, we used clustering techniques
to identify groups of individuals, with distinct gaze patterns. The
groups varied in how exhaustively they examined the search results
and in what regions of the search result page they paid most attention
to (organic results vs. ads). These results further our understanding
of how attention is distributed across increasingly complex search
result pages, and how individuals exhibit distinct patterns of attention
and interaction.