FindAll: a local search engine for mobile phones

  • Authors:

  • Aruna Balasubramanian;Niranjan Balasubramanian;Samuel J. Huston;Donald Metzler;David J. Wetherall

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Southern California, Los Angelos, CA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present the design and evaluation of FindAll, a local search engine that lets users search and retrieve web pages, even in the absence of connectivity. Our user study with 23 users show that mobile users often search for web pages that they have previously visited, known as re-finding. This re-finding behavior makes the case for a local solution. FindAll goes beyond caching and using keyword search, and instead, implements a full blown search engine. The key challenge in FindAll is in designing a search engine, which is both memory- and energy-intensive, on the constrained phone environment. To this end, FindAll balances the cost of running the search engine with the expected benefits of serving a web page locally. FindAll estimates the benefits of local search, by learning the re-finding behavior of users. We implement FindAll on Android by adapting a publicly available search engine. Our evaluations, based on the traces collected from our user study, shows that FindAll reduces search latency by two-folds for users who re-find often, and reduces 3G data usage by up to 100 MB a month.