Interactions - Mixpeek

Interactions capture how users engage with search results—clicks, purchases, skips, dwell time. This feedback automatically improves your retrievers through fine-tuning, personalization, and analytics.

Why Track Interactions

Automatic Quality Improvement: User behavior becomes training data for fine-tuning embedding models and ranking algorithms—no manual labeling required. Measure Real Performance: Traditional IR metrics (precision, recall) use test sets. Interactions reveal actual user satisfaction through click-through rates, conversion, and engagement. Personalization at Scale: Build user preference profiles from interaction history to deliver personalized results without managing separate recommendation systems. Identify Blind Spots: Find queries with low engagement, results that users skip despite high rankings, and content gaps causing zero-result queries.

What You Get

Training Data Generation

Interactions format into contrastive pairs (query, clicked_doc) for embedding fine-tuning. Position is recorded for future bias correction.

Relevance Analytics

CTR by position, documents with high skip rates, queries needing tuning, time-to-first-click—all without custom infrastructure.

Result Deduplication

Exclude previously purchased, viewed, or consumed content automatically by filtering on past interactions.

Popularity Boosting

Rerank results based on recent interaction signals (clicks, conversions) to surface trending content.

Capture Interactions

Record user behavior with a single API call:

POST /v1/retrievers/interactions
{
  "feature_id": "doc_xyz789",        # Document ID from retriever results
  "interaction_type": ["click"],     # One or more signal types
  "position": 3,                      # 0-based position in results (critical for bias correction)
  "metadata": {
    "duration_ms": 4500,              # Optional: dwell time, device, query text
    "query": "wireless earbuds"
  },
  "user_id": "user_123",              # For personalization and session tracking
  "session_id": "sess_456"
}

interaction_type is always a JSON array — even for a single signal (["click"], not "click"). The array captures the co-occurring signals of one user action, not several separate events: a single result that was shown, clicked, and dwelt on is ["view", "click", "long_view"] in one request. Send a separate request per discrete user action (each click, each purchase) — don’t batch unrelated events into one array.

Signal Types

Type	Strength	Use Case
`impression`	Neutral	Result was rendered on screen
`view`	Weak positive	User viewed a result
`click`	Moderate positive	User clicked result
`dwell`	Weak positive	User lingered on a result
`long_view`	Strong positive	Sustained engagement (track via `duration_ms`)
`purchase`	Strong positive	Conversion event
`add_to_cart`	Positive	Intent to purchase
`wishlist`	Positive	User added to wishlist
`positive_feedback`	Explicit positive	Thumbs up vote
`negative_feedback`	Explicit negative	Thumbs down vote
`share`	Strong positive	User shared the result
`bookmark`	Moderate positive	User saved for later
`query_refinement`	Neutral	User modified their search
`zero_results`	Neutral	Query yielded no results
`filter_toggle`	Neutral	User modified filters
`skip`	Weak negative	User ignored result
`return_to_results`	Moderate negative	User bounced back quickly

Combine multiple types per event: ["click", "long_view"] when a user clicks and stays engaged.

Signal Strategy

Which signals to capture, when, and why. Not all signals carry equal weight.

Signal Strength Matrix

This table maps each interaction type to how it’s used across the platform:

Signal Type	Strength	Fusion Learning	Personalization	Analytics	Fine-Tuning
`click`	Moderate	Primary positive signal	Session history	CTR metrics	Positive pairs
`long_view`	Strong	High-weight positive	Preference indicator	Engagement depth	Strong positive
`purchase`	Strongest	Conversion signal	Purchase exclusion	Revenue attribution	Gold standard
`add_to_cart`	Strong	Intent signal	Cart-based recs	Funnel metrics	Near-positive
`positive_feedback`	Explicit	Direct reward	Profile building	Quality score	Ground truth
`negative_feedback`	Explicit	Direct penalty	Anti-preference	Issue detection	Hard negative
`skip`	Weak negative	Implicit penalty	—	Skip rate	Soft negative
`return_to_results`	Moderate negative	Bounce signal	—	Bounce rate	Negative pair
`share`	Strong	Social proof	Sharing patterns	Virality	Strong positive
`bookmark`	Moderate	Save intent	Saved items	Save rate	Positive
`dwell`	Variable	Duration-weighted	—	Engagement depth	Weighted
`query_refinement`	Neutral (0.0)	Not in default reward map	—	Query analysis	—

Use Case Patterns

E-commerce
Media & Entertainment
Enterprise Search
Recommendations

Primary signals: purchase, add_to_cart, click — conversion is the strongest relevance indicator.Key patterns:

Track add_to_cart separately from purchase to measure funnel drop-off
Use position for learning-to-rank bias correction
Store order_value in metadata for revenue-weighted metrics

Primary signals: long_view, click, share — engagement depth matters more than the click.Key patterns:

Combine click and long_view in one event when engagement is sustained
Use duration_ms and completion_pct to distinguish genuine views from bounces
Track share as a strong positive signal for content quality

Primary signals: click, positive_feedback, bookmark — clicks alone may indicate obligation, not satisfaction.Key patterns:

Add thumbs-up/down UI to capture explicit feedback
Store department or role in metadata for demographic-level learned fusion
Track query_refinement to find queries where results fall short

Primary signals: click, purchase, negative_feedback — you need negative signals to avoid recommending disliked content.Key patterns:

Capture “not interested” / “hide” as negative_feedback to suppress similar content
Use purchase history to filter already-bought items from results
Track position carefully — recommendation position bias is stronger than search

Position Tracking

Always capture position. Although position-based reward weighting is not yet implemented, position is stored for analytics and will be used for future position-aware modeling. Recording it now avoids a costly backfill later.

Position bias is a well-known problem — users tend to click higher-ranked results regardless of relevance. The system records position on every interaction for analytics and audit purposes. However, position-based reward weighting is not yet implemented — a click at position 8 currently receives the same reward as a click at position 0. Record position now so you won’t need to backfill when position-aware modeling is added.

Cold Start

When you first deploy you have zero interactions. The system adapts automatically through the hierarchical fallback in Thompson Sampling (personal → demographic → global → uniform prior):

Interactions	Fusion Behavior	What To Do
0	Falls back to `rrf` (uniform weights)	Ship with `rrf`, start collecting signals
1–50	Global-level learned weights only	Monitor analytics for obvious issues
50–500	Demographic-level personalization begins	Verify evaluation metrics are trending up
500+	Per-user personalization kicks in	Run benchmarks to compare against baseline

Client-Side Capture

Track clicks and dwell time directly from the browser, using sendBeacon so dwell events survive page unload:

// Track clicks with position
document.querySelectorAll('.search-result').forEach((el, index) => {
  el.addEventListener('click', () => {
    fetch('/api/interactions', {
      method: 'POST',
      body: JSON.stringify({
        feature_id: el.dataset.documentId,
        interaction_type: ['click'],
        position: index,
        metadata: { query: currentQuery },
        user_id: userId, session_id: sessionId
      })
    });
  });
});

// Track dwell time on result detail pages
let startTime = Date.now();
window.addEventListener('beforeunload', () => {
  const dwellMs = Date.now() - startTime;
  navigator.sendBeacon('/api/interactions', JSON.stringify({
    feature_id: currentDocId,
    interaction_type: dwellMs > 5000 ? ['click', 'long_view'] : ['click'],
    position: resultPosition,
    metadata: { duration_ms: dwellMs, query: originalQuery },
    user_id: userId
  }));
});

Outcomes & Use Cases

1. Fine-Tune Embedding Models

# Collect 30 days of interaction data as training pairs
training_data = analytics.get_query_document_pairs(
    date_range="last_30_days",
    min_interactions=2  # Only docs with real engagement
)

# System formats as contrastive pairs:
# Positive: (query, clicked_doc)
# Hard negative: (query, high_ranked_but_skipped_doc)
# Position bias automatically corrected

fine_tuned_model = training.fine_tune(
    base_model="text-embedding-3-small",
    training_data=training_data
)

Outcome: 10-30% improvement in relevance metrics from domain-specific fine-tuning using real user preferences.

2. Identify & Fix Ranking Issues

# Find queries where top results are skipped
signals = analytics.get_retriever_signals(retriever_id="ret_123")
# Returns:
# - Documents ranked high but skipped (ranking issues)
# - Queries with &lt;5% CTR (need tuning)
# - Average position of first click (relevance proxy)

Outcome: Data-driven decisions on which retrievers need adjustment, which taxonomy mappings to update, or which filters to refine.

3. Personalize Without Recommendation Infrastructure

# Exclude content user already consumed
previous_purchases = interactions.list(
    user_id="user_123",
    interaction_type=["purchase"],
    days=90
)

retriever.execute(
    query="new arrivals",
    filters={
        "document_id": {"$nin": [i.feature_id for i in previous_purchases]}
    }
)

Outcome: Improved user experience (no duplicate suggestions) without building separate collaborative filtering or recommendation systems.

4. Continuously Tune Ranking from Interactions

Set fusion: "learned" and click/purchase signals automatically re-weight your search over time — no manual reranking rules. Weight higher-intent signals above clicks with the reward_map:

{
  "stages": [
    {
      "stage_name": "search",
      "stage_type": "filter",
      "config": {
        "stage_id": "feature_search",
        "parameters": {
          "searches": [
            { "feature_uri": "mixpeek://text_extractor@v1/multilingual_e5_large_instruct_v1",
              "query": { "input_mode": "text", "value": "{{INPUT.query}}" }, "top_k": 100 },
            { "feature_uri": "mixpeek://multimodal_extractor@v1/vertex_multimodal_embedding",
              "query": { "input_mode": "text", "value": "{{INPUT.query}}" }, "top_k": 100 }
          ],
          "fusion": "learned",
          "learning_config": {
            "reward_map": { "click": 1.0, "add_to_cart": 2.0, "purchase": 3.0 },
            "decay_window_days": 30
          },
          "final_top_k": 25
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Outcome: click/purchase signals continuously re-tune feature weights via auto-tune — higher-intent interactions carry more weight — with no manual reranking rules. See Reward Signals for the full reward_map.

Query & Export

Retrieve interactions for analysis or external ML pipelines:

# Get all interactions for a document
POST /v1/retrievers/interactions/list
{
  "feature_id": "doc_xyz789"
}

# Get user interaction history
POST /v1/retrievers/interactions/list
{
  "user_id": "user_123",
  "limit": 50
}

# Export for training (bulk pagination)
POST /v1/retrievers/interactions/list
{
  "page": 1,
  "page_size": 1000
}

Reward Values and Auto-Tune

When a retriever uses Auto-Tune (fusion: "learned"), every interaction automatically receives a computed reward_value stored in its metadata. This value is derived from the retriever’s reward_map configuration at write time:

{
  "interaction_type": ["click", "purchase"],
  "metadata": {
    "reward_value": 3.0,
    "query": "wireless earbuds"
  }
}

In this example, the reward is determined by the interaction type with the largest absolute value: purchase (3.0) wins over click (1.0), so reward_value is 3.0 (not summed). The reward value determines how much this interaction shifts the fusion weights for the associated feature. How it feeds into Auto-Tune:

Each interaction records which feature URI surfaced the clicked result
The reward_value adjusts the Thompson Sampling Beta distribution for that feature
Positive rewards increase the feature’s weight; negative rewards decrease it
The next search for this user reflects the updated weights

See Reward Signals for the full default reward map, customization options, and examples for different use cases (e-commerce, content, internal search).

Feature URI

The feature_uri field identifies which embedding model/feature produced the result the user interacted with. This is required for Auto-Tune — without it, the interaction cannot contribute to weight learning because the system doesn’t know which feature to reward.

{
  "feature_id": "doc_product_789",
  "interaction_type": ["click"],
  "feature_uri": "mixpeek://text_extractor@v1/multilingual_e5_large_instruct_v1",
  "user_id": "user_456"
}

You can find the feature_uri for each result in the execution response’s learned_fusion_context.feature_uris array, or extract it from the document’s metadata. If feature_uri is set as a top-level field, it is automatically promoted into metadata.feature_uri for backward compatibility.

The session_id field enables within-session adaptation. When provided, clicks in the current session influence the next search immediately via a session cache — without waiting for the ClickHouse write-then-read cycle.

Privacy & Compliance

GDPR Deletion: Remove all interactions for a user to honor right-to-deletion requests.

DELETE /v1/retrievers/interactions/<interaction_id>

Anonymization: Hash user_id before sending if you need consistent tracking without PII.

Python SDK

from mixpeek import Mixpeek

client = Mixpeek(api_key="sk_...")

# After executing a retriever search
results = client.retrievers.execute(
    "ret_abc123",
    inputs={
        "query": "wireless headphones",
        "user_id": "user_456",
        "session_id": "sess_789",
    },
)

# Record a click on the 3rd result
client.retrievers.create_interaction(
    feature_id=results["documents"][2]["feature_id"],
    interaction_type=["click"],
    position=2,
    user_id="user_456",
    session_id="sess_789",
    retriever_id="ret_abc123"
)

Bulk Backfill

Migrate existing interaction history into Mixpeek using the batch endpoint. Send up to 1,000 interactions per call with occurred_at timestamps so temporal decay weights them by their true age.

curl -X POST "$MP_API_URL/v1/retrievers/interactions/batch" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MP_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Namespace: $MP_NAMESPACE" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "interactions": [
      {
        "feature_id": "doc_001",
        "interaction_type": ["click"],
        "position": 0,
        "user_id": "user_123",
        "feature_uri": "mixpeek://text_extractor@v1/multilingual_e5_large_instruct_v1",
        "occurred_at": "2026-01-15T10:30:00Z"
      },
      {
        "feature_id": "doc_002",
        "interaction_type": ["purchase"],
        "position": 2,
        "user_id": "user_123",
        "feature_uri": "mixpeek://text_extractor@v1/multilingual_e5_large_instruct_v1",
        "occurred_at": "2026-01-16T14:00:00Z"
      }
    ]
  }'

The response includes per-item results: {created: 2, failed: 0, results: [{index: 0, interaction_id: "...", status: "created"}, ...]}. Backfilled interactions bypass the real-time session cache — they affect learned fusion weights only after the next ClickHouse aggregation.

Best Practices

Always capture position — recorded for analytics and future position-aware modeling
Store query text in metadata — enables query-document pair export for fine-tuning
Track dwell time — separates genuine engagement (long_view) from accidental clicks
Backfill with timestamps — use the batch endpoint with occurred_at so temporal decay weights by true age
Monitor weekly — set up dashboards to track CTR trends and catch relevance regressions early

See Improve Relevance → Analytics for dashboards and alerting on interaction-driven metrics like CTR, engagement rates, and query quality.

​Why Track Interactions

​What You Get

Training Data Generation

Relevance Analytics

Result Deduplication

Popularity Boosting

​Capture Interactions

​Signal Types

​Signal Strategy

​Signal Strength Matrix

​Use Case Patterns

​Position Tracking

​Cold Start

​Client-Side Capture

​Outcomes & Use Cases

​1. Fine-Tune Embedding Models

​2. Identify & Fix Ranking Issues

​3. Personalize Without Recommendation Infrastructure

​4. Continuously Tune Ranking from Interactions

​Query & Export

​Reward Values and Auto-Tune

​Feature URI

​Privacy & Compliance

​Python SDK

​Bulk Backfill

​Best Practices

Why Track Interactions

What You Get

Capture Interactions

Signal Types

Signal Strategy

Signal Strength Matrix

Use Case Patterns

Position Tracking

Cold Start

Client-Side Capture

Outcomes & Use Cases

1. Fine-Tune Embedding Models

2. Identify & Fix Ranking Issues

3. Personalize Without Recommendation Infrastructure

4. Continuously Tune Ranking from Interactions

Query & Export

Reward Values and Auto-Tune

Feature URI

Privacy & Compliance

Python SDK

Bulk Backfill

Best Practices