A proposal to research cursor mining in web search, submitted by Ph.D student Jeff Huang and Associate Professor Jacob Wobbrock, was awarded a $47,000 Google research grant.

Huang's dissertation focuses on mouse cursor behaviors and their value in improving web search. His work has found that "hovering over links, and event movement speed and duration, have been shown to correlate with search result relevance and abandonment, suggesting that cursor behavior canpotentially be useful as a feature for ranking."

The Google research grant will allow Huang and Wobbrock to explore ways to overcome the challenges of logging and analyzing cursor behavior, with the goal of developing accurate and useful tools that will improve web search.

Google Research Awards are given to support academic research aimed at improving information access.