Abstract:

Users’ visual gaze behaviors in search engine result page (SERP) has been an important research content in information retrieval field, which can help optimize the layout of SERP and enhance users’ search efficiency. However, few researches have been done on the gaze behavior in SERP of cross device search. Through a crossdevice search experiment, this paper studies the distribution of user’s visual behavior in SERP in different inter device context. The results reveals  that users’ visual attention isless focused comparing the first device. The value of “Eyetracking entropy” in result list of SERP shows a upward trend generally after device transition. Users pay the most attention to the search results snippets in the first screen of SERP after the device transition, and the highest promotion of visual attention occurs in the region about crossdevice history. This indicates that the crossdevice history information provided by the search engine can effectively help users recover the search task and improve the search efficiency. In the unique search results region, there is no significant difference in the visual attention.

Keywords: Cross-device search, Search behavior, Eye tracking, User study, Search engine result page(SERP)