New ad system that can detect online shoppers

LONDON - A new tool examines the cursor behaviour of search-engine users to decide if they are shopping or merely surfing.

Eugene Agichtein and Qi Guo at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has said that websites like Google commonly display sponsored results above the actual ones, which can be annoying for someone who’s not shopping.

They created a web browser add-on that tracks the cursor, and found that the data could help to distinguish between a “browsing” and “shopping” search session over 96 per cent of the time.

“As the session progresses, our system would be able to make increasingly accurate predictions of intent,” New Scientist quoted Agichtein as saying. (ANI)