Joint Seminar: Center for Web Research – Yahoo! Research LA

When: Thursday March 8, 12:00

Where: Auditorium 4th floor, DCC, FCFM, Univ. de Chile

Title: Predictive User Caches

Speaker: Benjamin Piwowarski, Yahoo! Research LA

Abstract

Web search engines consistently collect information about users interaction with the system. They record the issued query, the URL of presented and selected documents along with their ranking. This information is very valuable: It is a poll over millions of users on the most various topics and it has been used in many ways to mine users interests and preferences. Query logs have the potential to partially alleviate the search engines from thousand of searches by providing a way to predict answers for a subset of queries and users without knowing the content of a document. Even if the predicted result is at rank one, this analysis might be of interest: If there is enough confidence on a user’s click, we might redirect the user directly to the page whose link would be clicked. We present some early results with three predictive models based respectively on information of one user, a group of user and all the users for a given query.