The Influence of Image Search Intents on User Behavior and Satisfaction

Abstract

Understanding search intents behind queries is of vital importance for improving search performance or designing better evaluation metrics. Although there exist many efforts in Web search user intent taxonomies and investigating how users interaction behaviors vary with the intent types, only a few of them have been made specifically for the image search scenario. Different from previous works which investigate image search user behavior and task characteristics based on either lab studies or large scale log analysis, we conducted a field study which lasts one month and involves 2,040 search queries from 555 search tasks. By this means, we collected relatively large amount of practical search behavior data with extensive first-tier annotation from users. With this data set, we investigate how various image search intents affect users search behavior, and try to adopt different signals to predict search satisfaction under the certain intent. Meanwhile, external assessors were also employed to categorize each search task using four orthogonal intent taxonomies. Based on the hypothesis that behavior is dependent of task type, we analyze user search behavior on the field study data, examining characteristics of the session, click and mouse patterns. We also link the search satisfaction prediction to image search intent, which shows that different types of signals play different roles in satisfaction prediction as intent varies. Our findings indicate the importance of considering search intent in user behavior analysis and satisfaction prediction in image search.