Knowledge effects on document selection in search results pages

Abstract

Click through events in search results pages (SERPs) are not reliable implicit indicators of document relevance. A user's task and domain knowledge are key factors in recognition and link selection and the most useful SERP document links may be those that best match the user's domain knowledge. User study participants rated their knowledge of genomics MeSH terms before conducting 2004 TREC Genomics Track tasks. Each participant's document knowledge was represented by their knowledge of the indexing MeSH terms. Results show high, intermediate, and low domain knowledge groups had similar document selection SERP rank distributions. SERP link selection distribution varied when participant knowledge of the available documents was analyzed. High domain knowledge participants usually selected a document with the highest personal knowledge rating. Low domain knowledge participants were reasonably successful at selecting available documents of which they had the most knowledge, while intermediate knowledge participants often failed to do so. This evidence for knowledge effects on SERP link selection may contribute to understanding the potential for personalization of search results ranking based on user domain knowledge.