Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Switching Detection Challenge, which is a part of the WSDM 2013 Web Search Click Data (WSCD) workshop. It provides a unique opportunity to consolidate and scrutinize the work from industrial labs on predicting the search engine switching events using user logged search behavior context. It provides a fully anonymized dataset shared by Yandex which has anonymized users ids, queries, clicks and search engine switching actions. Detecting the fact of switching, when switching events cannot be monitored directly, is difficult, and is not yet a solved problem. It is important for understanding of users' satisfaction with the search engine and the complexity of search tasks. This Challenge and the shared dataset aims to enable a whole new set of researchers to study the problem of search engine switching detection.

Contestants can participate as individuals, or as teams. You will find a detailed description of the task, data sets and result evaluation methodology at:

http://switchdetect.yandex.ru/en

Important Dates:

Oct 23, 2012 - Challenge opened
Dec 22, 2012 - End of challenge (13:00 Moscow Time)
Dec 25, 2012 - Winners candidacy notification
Jan 20, 2013 - Reports deadline
Feb 4, 2013 - WSCD workshop at WSDM 2013 (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nickcr/wscd2013/) and Winners announcement

The top three competitors will receive the following cash prizes:

1st place: $5,000
2nd place: $3,000
3rd place: $1,000

Challenge Organizers

Pavel Serdyukov, Eugene Kharitonov, Alexey Gorodilov (Yandex)
Georges Dupret (Yahoo!)
Nick Craswell (Microsoft)