Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations 116
lpctstr writes "Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have found that cursor movements and cursor hovers can detect the relevance of a search result and whether a user may abandon the search. They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript to silently record movements and clicks on Bing and find that computing relevance using movements + clicks works better than just clicks (the current state-of-the-art). They explain some of this due to cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?"
"Future" is a mouse? (Score:3, Insightful)
They explain some of this due to [mouse] cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?"
...Just in time for Web use to go mobile and touch-based.
Re:People like me (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, AFAIK, you're in the minority. I think most people do in fact move their mouse with their gaze, because it cuts the delay between when they decide to click on something and when they actually click on it. Think of it as a pre-loading or caching technique -- you don't pay much cost for moving your mouse around a little bit, but you can save time. At least that's my hypothesis.
I dunno...
I mean, obviously, they've got some kind of research to back it up... But it seems like this would be pretty useless to me. I mean, do people actually follow what they're reading with the mouse cursor?
I generally plant my mouse cursor in a chunk of whitespace so that it's out of the way while I'm reading. When I find something to click on, I go straight to that link and click. If there's multiple things I want to click on I'll generally hit them with the middle button to open multiple tabs. I don't generally pause my cursor over anything in particular.
And then there are the people who just don't stop moving their mouse cursor... The thing spins and swirls around the screen, slowly circling towards a link or a button that they want to click. I wonder what kind of data they could mine from that sort of behavior?
I will occasionally highlight a few random characters to act as a bookmark if I have to go do something else. What would this be interpreted as?
efficient algorithm written in Javascript (Score:2, Insightful)
From TFA:
They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript.
Is it me or they are using two incompatible words in the same phrase?
Re:efficient algorithm written in Javascript (Score:3, Insightful)