Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations

Posted by timothy on Monday January 31, 2011 @01:03AM from the wait-'til-they-track-heavy-breathing dept.

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?"

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Re:Maybe it can tell me which I like better by Chrisq · 2011-01-31 01:08 · Score: 4, Funny

I'd like to bing both of them
Re:Now... by Chrisq · 2011-01-31 01:24 · Score: 5, Funny

Microsoft is going to patent hesitation
Google would have got in first but didn't want to rush it.
Re:we need more front-ends to the front-ends by Anonymous Coward · 2011-01-31 05:51 · Score: 2, Funny

Upgrade your computer more often. If you want to stay ahead of bloated software, you still need to spend money on serious hardware. My annual upgrade budget is $1000/year. I budget that in right below my health and car insurance in terms of priority. My current refresh is an i7 overclocked to 4.1 ghz, 12 gigs of ram, an intel X-25m ssd, and so on. Web seems plenty responsive to me.