Manipulating Time Perception of Web Search Users

Time is an important factor in information retrieval studies including search evaluation, user behavior analysis and query understanding. In most of the previous works, time is usually an objective factor measured by timing devices. However, the time perceived by user seems more intuitive to describe the impact of time because search user's opinion is considered subjective. Psychological researches have reported that time perception can be affected by many physical and psychological factors. In this work, a laboratory study with 50 participants was adopted to investigate the impact of Temporal Relevance, e.g., the awareness of elapsed time, on time perception of Web search users. Experimental results show that participants in high temporal relevance environments tend to perceive significantly longer task durations than the actual ones. It shows that the perception of time can be manipulated in Web search scenario and reveals the necessity to take the factor of user perception into consideration in time-related Web search researches such as effort-based evaluation.