The subject disclosure is directed towards using a satisfaction model's prediction as to whether a user was satisfied or dissatisfied in satisfying a search goal to help estimate the relevance of a URL/document that was returned and clicked by the user. The clickthrough data for a search goal session is processed by either a utility model or a despair model based on whether the satisfaction model indicated that the search goal session ended with the user satisfied or dissatisfied, respectively. The utility model distributes a utility value to each clicked URL, while the despair model distributes a despair value to each clicked URL. The utility value and despair value of each query-URL pair may be used as corresponding feature data for learning a search ranker.