Understanding And Predicting Graded Search Satisfaction

Understanding and estimating satisfaction with search engines is an important aspect of evaluating retrieval performance. Research to date has modeled and predicted search satisfaction on a binary scale, i.e., the searchers are either satisfied or dissatisfied with their search outcome. However, users' search experience is a complex construct and there are different degrees of satisfaction. As such, binary classification of satisfaction may be limiting. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the problem of understanding and predicting graded (multi-level) search satisfaction. We examine sessions mined from search engine logs, where searcher satisfaction was also assessed on multi-point scale by human annotators. Leveraging these search log data, we observe rich and non-monotonous changes in search behavior in sessions with different degrees of satisfaction. The findings suggest that we should predict finer-grained satisfaction levels. To address this issue, we model search satisfaction using features indicating search outcome, search effort, and changes in both outcome and effort during a session. We show that our approach can predict subtle changes in search satisfaction more accurately than state-of-the-art methods, affording greater insight into search satisfaction. The strong performance of our models has implications for search providers seeking to accurately measure satisfaction with their services.