Good Abandonment in Mobile and PC Internet Search

1. Good Abandonment in Mobile and PC Internet Search Jane Li, Scott B. Huffman, and Akihito Tokuda Google Inc.

2. Related topics in class • Query Processing • Relevance Feedback • Snippets Good Abandonment in Internet Search

3. What is Query Abandonment ? • User doesn’t click on any search results on search result page • the query and search results are abandoned. • Traditional opinion : • Indicatorof user dissatisfaction if users choose not to click on anyresults. • One implication of this study is that it is a mistake to uniformly consider query abandonment as a negative signal. Abandonment is no longer always a reflection of user dissatisfaction. Good Abandonment in Internet Search

4. What is Good Query Abandonment ? • The query is abandoned, but the user's information need was successfully addressed by the search results page. • no need to click on a result or refine the query. • Example: • Google Snippets : weather, stock, local business addresses, images. user's information need was successfully addressed by the search results page. Good Abandonment in Internet Search

5. Analysis of abandoned queries • Sample from Google’s search logs. • Three countries : United States, Japan and China. • Two modalities : PC search and mobile search. • 6 query streams • particularly interested in mobile search and how it compares to PC search with respect to abandonment. • Clumsy search experience compared to PC • Hard to entry • loading pages is slow Good Abandonment in Internet Search

6. What is Potential Good Abandonment ? • “classify a query as a potential good abandonment if there isadominant information need associated with the query that we felt could theoretically be achieved by an internet search engine results page.” • i.e. • Researchers Determined whether a abandonment is a potential good abandonment of not. • Determined by whether the information need behind the query can be satisfied theoretically. • Upper bound estimate on good abandonment Good Abandonment in Internet Search

7. What is likely good abandonment ? • “Information need expressed by the query was clearly met on the results page we classified it as a likely good abandonment.” • Determined by examining the actual results provided by Google. • the subset of potentially good abandonments Good Abandonment in Internet Search

8. Percentage of potential good abandonment queries which are classified as “Yes”,”Maybe”,”No”with respect to the likely good abandonment Percentages of queries classified as "Yes","Maybe", "No" with respect to the potential good abandonment Good Abandonment in Internet Search

9. Which categories present the most opportunities for driving additional good abandonment ? • Categories by Information need: • local, currency, map, news, person, etc. • counting queries that are potentially good abandonments, but are not fully answered by the current search results page. • the "headroom“ for driving further good abandonment in each information need category. • Top categories show room forimprovement: • Local, Answer, Images, Celebrities Good Abandonment in Internet Search

10. Conclusion • Several Findings • good abandonment make up a large subset of all abandoned queries. • a good abandonment rate on mobile search that is significantly higher than PC search. • there is still an opportunity to improve for search engines to directly address users' information needs on search result page. • reasonable headroom for several types of information needs • Cons • For mobile search, our analysis didn't differentiate searches from different device • top-tier smart phones or conventional mobile phones • connection speeds Good Abandonment in Internet Search