FOR an online advert to have an impact, it helps if the audience is interested. A new tool examines the cursor behaviour of search-engine users to decide if they are shopping or merely surfing.
Sites like Google commonly display sponsored results above the actual ones, which can be annoying for someone who’s not shopping, say Eugene Agichtein and Qi Guo at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
People often use cursor moves to help them pick their way through a screen of text, so the pair wondered if these could be analysed to discern if a person was reading the sponsored…
