A User Effort Measurement for Query Selection

User effort is an important measurement of search quality. It strongly affects user experience and finally, affects conversion. There are measurements about user effort in search. However, they all take only query result browsing efforts into account. Few of them measures the effort of query selection, or the effort to choose a suitable query. This paper shows that query selection effort is a significant part of overall user effort, almost as important as browsing effort. This paper further introduces an entropy-like effort measurement approach for query selection. Statistic and simulation results strongly indicate that our measurement reflects real user effort better.

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