The Microsoft researchers argued that a single fixed dwell-time threshold assumes uniform reading time and can misclassify click-level satisfaction.

Cited by documentation

Sources

• Modeling Dwell Time to Predict Click-level Satisfaction (WSDM 2014)

  Microsoft Research / ACM WSDM 2014 (Kim, Hassan Awadallah, White, Zitouni) · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-21

  “having a single threshold value assumes that users need a fixed amount of time to be satisfied with any result click” — Abstract / Section 1

• Modeling Dwell Time to Predict Click-level Satisfaction - Microsoft Research publication page

  Microsoft Research · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-21

  “the amount of dwell time needed to predict whether any click is associated with satisfaction” — Publication abstract

• Explicit In Situ User Feedback for Web Search Results

  Microsoft Research · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-21

  “the dwell time threshold between negative and positive in situ feedback being 87 seconds, longer than the more common heuristic of 30 seconds” — lines 9-11

• Personalized Models of Search Satisfaction

  Microsoft Research · primary source · retrieved 2026-08-21

  “proposed models can predict search satisfaction more accurately than a global baseline that applies the same satisfaction model across all users” — lines 10-12

• A Term-Based Methodology for Query Reformulation Understanding

  arXiv (independent authors citing Kim et al. 2014) · retrieved 2026-08-21

  “argues that this single value cannot capture the complexities of reading behavior and user satisfaction” — Section 5.3 Dwell Time