Only forward?: toward understanding human visual behaviour when examining search results.

Search is near-ubiquitous in human society, being used for entertainment, health, financial and business information seeking. Traditional methods of search evaluation have assumed that searchers move forward through search results in a linear manner; early eye tracking studies have suggested the same. Recent research, though, including eye-tracking data, has demonstrated a number of counter-cases, particularly for search in complex conditions. These examples highlight how little we understand where humans look or what they are doing when examining search results: in this paper we undertake a broad survey of the literature to refine this research question, and suggest avenues for developing a model of behaviour.