Evaluating interfaces for intelligent mobile search

  • Authors:

  • Karen Church;Barry Smyth;Mark T. Keane

  • Affiliations:

  • University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland;University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland;University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • W4A '06 Proceedings of the 2006 international cross-disciplinary workshop on Web accessibility (W4A): Building the mobile web: rediscovering accessibility?
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Recent developments in the mobile phone market have led to a significant increase in the number of users accessing the Mobile Internet. Handsets have been improved to support a diverse range of content types (text, graphics, audio, video etc.), infrastructure investments have delivered improved bandwidth, and changes to billing models offer users much greater value for content. Today large numbers of users are moving away from browsing operator portals and towards off-portal search, leading to a growing need for mobile specific search engine technologies. In this paper we argue that existing mobile search engines are unlikely to offer an adequate service for mobile searchers. Most borrow traditional query-based search and list-based result presentation formats from Web search and as such are not well optimised for the input and display features of mobile devices. For example, many simply attempt to translate Web content for the mobile space which is not appropriate. In this paper we evaluate an alternative strategy which replaces the usual result snippet with a more economic alternative that is composed of the keywords used in related queries. We argue that this alternative is better suited to the display characteristics of mobile devices, without compromising the informativeness of result snippets.