Investigating the effectiveness of clickthrough data for document reordering

Abstract

User clicks¿also known as clickthrough data¿have been cited as an implicit form of relevance feedback. Previous work suggests that relative preferences between documents can be accurately derived from user clicks. In this paper, we analyze the impact of document reordering¿based on clickthrough¿on search effectiveness, measured using both TREC and user relevance judgments. We also propose new strategies for document reordering that can outperform current techniques. Preliminary results show that current reordering methods do not lead to consistent improvements of search quality, but may even lead to poorer results if not used with care