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In this work, we carry out two complementary studies to investigate the impact of response latency on users\u2019 searching behaviour in web search engines. We first conduct a controlled user study to investigate the sensitivity of users to increasing delays in response latency. This study shows that the users of a fast search system are more sensitive to delays than the users of a slow search system. Moreover, the study finds that users are more likely to notice the response latency delays beyond a certain latency threshold, their search experience potentially being affected. We then analyse a large number of search queries obtained from Yahoo Web Search to investigate the impact of response latency on users\u2019 click behaviour. This analysis demonstrates the significant change in click behaviour as the response latency increases. We also find that certain user, context, and query attributes play a role in the way increasing response latency affects the click behaviour. To demonstrate a possible use case for our findings, we devise a machine-learning framework that leverages the latency impact, together with other features, to predict whether a user will issue any clicks on web search results. As a further extension of this use case, we investigate whether this machine-learning framework can be exploited to help search engines reduce their energy consumption during query processing.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3106372","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,8,29]],"date-time":"2017-08-29T17:49:18Z","timestamp":1504028958000},"page":"1-42","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":24,"title":["Understanding and Leveraging the Impact of Response Latency on User Behaviour in Web Search"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"36","author":[{"given":"Xiao","family":"Bai","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Yahoo Research, CA, USA"}]},{"given":"Ioannis","family":"Arapakis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Yahoo Labs"}]},{"given":"B. 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