There are a lot of hints, scattered through a number of patent filings, that user behavior information such as time spent on site, amount scrolled down a page, mouse movements on a page, and more may play a role in the rankings of pages – and in personalization. I think that user behavior may play an even increasing role in the future. I’ll point to a couple of those here:

Google’s patent, Information retrieval based on historical data, has a section on how user behavior might be used. Here’s a snippet:

User Behavior

According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information corresponding to individual or aggregate user behavior relating to a document over time may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with the document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. Search engine 125 may then score the document based, at least in part, on this information.

If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively. For example, assume that the query “Riverview swimming schedule” returns a document with the title “Riverview Swimming Schedule.” Assume further that users used to spend 30 seconds accessing it, but now every user that selects the document only spends a few seconds accessing it. Search engine 125 may use this information to determine that the document is stale (i.e., contains an outdated swimming schedule) and score the document accordingly.

In summary, search engine 125 may generate (or alter) a score associated with a document based, at least in part, on information corresponding to individual or aggregate user behavior relating to the document over time.

Another Google patent describes how that kind of tracking user behavior could work with personalization of search results. See: Personalization of placed content ordering in search results.

This patent describes how information such as choices of pages from search results, amount of scrolling upon a page, browsing habits, and other user information can help a search engine personalize search results for a particular query. Here’s a snippet from that patent that explains the “why” of why they would do that:

[0009] For example, assume that a user submits to a search engine a search query having only one term “blackberry”. Without any other context, on the top of a list of documents returned by a PageRank-based search engine may be a link to “www.blackberry.net,” because this web page has the highest page rank. However, if the query requester is a person with interests in foods and cooking, it would be more useful to order the search results so as to include at the top of the returned results web pages with recipes or other food related text, pictures or the like. It would be desirable to have a search engine that is able to reorder its search results, or to otherwise customize the search results, so as to emphasize web pages that are most likely to be of interest to the person submitting the search query. Further, it would be desirable for such a system to require minimal input from individual users, operating largely or completely without explicit input from the user with regard to the user’s preferences and interests. Finally, it would be desirable for such a system to meet users’ requirements with respect to security and privacy.

We’re thinking along the same lines. I really enjoy going through search results for queries, and exploring different meanings for them, seeing what shows up as query suggestions, looking at plurals and singular versions, joining and separating and hyphenating words when appropriate, and so on. I like seeing what triggers the appearance of images and videos and news and local results as well. That examination can give you lots of ideas when creating content.

Thank you. This particular patent is from Yahoo, but I think it does a good job of showing how methods that might be used for something like finding related queries, which all of the major search engines do, could be used in other ways as well.