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Characterizing commercial intent

Published: 02 November 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the intent underlying user's queries may help personalize search results and therefore improve user satisfaction. We develop a methodology for using the content of search engine result pages (SERPs) along with the information obtained from query strings to study characteristics of query intent, with a particular focus on sponsored search. This work represents an initial step towards the development and evaluation of an ontology for commercial search, considering queries that reference specific products, brands and retailers. The characteristics of query categories are studied with respect to aggregated user's clickthrough behavior on advertising links. We present a model for clickthrough behavior that considers the influence of such factors as the location of ads and the rank of ads, along with query category. We evaluate our work using a large corpus of clickthrough data obtained from a major commercial search engine. Our findings suggest that query based features, along with the content of SERPs, are effective in detecting query intent. The clickthrough behavior is found to be consistent with the classification for the general categories of query intent, while for product, brand and retailer categories, all is true to a lesser extent.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '09: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
November 2009
2162 pages
ISBN:9781605585123
DOI:10.1145/1645953
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 November 2009

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  1. clickthrough
  2. evaluation
  3. query intent
  4. sponsored search

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