Live Web Search Experiments for the Rest of Us

Abstract

There are significant barriers to academic research into user Web search preferences. Academic researchers are unable to manipulate the results shown by a major search engine to users and would have no access to the interaction data collected by the engine. Our initial approach to overcoming this was to ask participants to submit queries to an experimental search engine rather than their usual search tool. Over several different experiments we found that initial user buy-in was high but that people quickly drifted back to their old habits and stopped contributing data. Here, we report our investigation of possible reasons why this occurs. An alternative approach is exemplified by the Lemur browser toolbar, which allows local collection of user interaction data from search engine sessions, but does not allow result pages to be modified. We will demonstrate a new Firefox toolbar that we have developed to support experiments in which search results may be arbitrarily manipulated. Using our toolbar, academics can set up the experiments they want to conduct, while collecting (subject to human experimentation guidelines) queries, clicks and dwell times as well as optional explicit judgments.