Constructing Click Models for Mobile Search

Abstract

Users' click-through behavior is considered as a valuable yet noisy source of implicit relevance feedback for web search engines. A series of click models have therefore been proposed to extract accurate and unbiased relevance feedback from click logs. Previous works have shown that users' search behaviors in mobile and desktop scenarios are rather different in many aspects, therefore, the click models that were designed for desktop search may not be as effective in mobile context. To address this problem, we propose a novel Mobile Click Model (MCM) that models how users examine and click search results on mobile SERPs. Specifically, we incorporate two biases that are prevalent in mobile search into existing click models: 1) the click necessity bias that some results can bring utility and usefulness to users without being clicked; 2) the examination satisfaction bias that a user may feel satisfied and stop searching after examining a result with low click necessity. Extensive experiments on large-scale real mobile search logs show that: 1) MCM outperforms existing models in predicting users' click behavior in mobile search; 2) MCM can extract richer information, such as the click necessity of search results and the probability of user satisfaction, from mobile click logs. With this information, we can estimate the quality of different vertical results and improve the ranking of heterogeneous results in mobile search.