Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations

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?"

Comments

Re:People like me

[martas]

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.