Weighted Information Gain and User Clicks on Web Search Results

In this poster, we demonstrate that the WIG (Weighted Information Gain) technique, originally proposed for retrieval performance prediction and shown to be effective particularly in Web search environments, has an interesting connection with user clicks on Web search results. Specifically, we observe that high WIG scores generally suggest more clicks. This makes WIG a useful feature for predicting user’s preference for search results, which has potential applications in many important areas such as the automatic tuning of search engine parameters, personalization, sponsored search and others.