Tracking Mouse Movements On Websites

from the they-know-what-you're-thinking... dept

Some researchers are working on ways to track your mouse movements when you visit a webpage. They think this will give useful info about links that you "almost" clicked on, or thought about clicking on, and which areas of a website are more interesting to readers. It's might be interesting, or it might be useless. I recently noticed that when I'm reading a webpage, I tend to randomly move the mouse around and occasionally highlight words, sentences, paragraphs or entire articles for no clear reason. Hopefully I'm screwing up some tracking software somewhere.
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  • identicon
    The Captain, 10 Sep 2001 @ 10:59am

    Talk about a hare brained idea

    I don't know anyone for whom this tracking software would be accurate. While I read, the mouse if off to the side somewhere and I'm paging down...if I'm surfing aimlessly, I don't move my mouse over all my choices while I "consider" or "almost" click...geez...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Kevin Joyce, 10 Sep 2001 @ 2:29pm

    Probably useless, but...

    I actually will use the mouse to highlight text taht I'm reading. Especially when it is interesting. Its just a strange habit I picked up. But I really don't think you could find anything useful in the data because most people's habits are probably just random. It may be worth trying though. We do lots of things in life we aren't aware of.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Duffman, 10 Sep 2001 @ 5:07pm

      Re: Probably useless, but...

      I know I scroll back and forth with the mouse ball, sometimes just for fun. Back and forth, up and down, I hope some tracking developer is wondering what the heck I'm doing. I can't really see this being useful, however. I think the randomness would essentially cancel out any useful results, and I think there would be much more randomness than people pausing over links but not clicking.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        mhh5, 10 Sep 2001 @ 6:33pm

        tracking the wrong bodypart...

        They should be tracking eye movements. But I guess that's too hard to do....

        link to this | view in chronology ]


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