Preliminary evidence for top-down and bottom-up processes in web search navigation

In current theories of web navigation, link evaluation has been treated primarily as a bottom-up process involving assessing the semantic distance between a search goal and a given link in the information source. In this paper we investigate whether link evaluation could be subject to top-down influence from knowledge of the information source. We measured fixation durations that occurred during link evaluation and found shorter durations in the search for easy goals. This preliminary finding suggests that for goals with category names readily retrievable from knowledge of the information source, search is likely aided by top-down influences.