A Mobile World Wide Web Search Engine

Wen-Chen HuDepartment of Computer Science

University of North DakotaGrand Forks, ND 58202-9015

wenchen@cs.und.edu

Outline

1. Introduction

2. A web search engine

3. Search engine technologies

4. A mobile web search engine

5. Adaptive viewing the mobile search results

6. Summary

Introductiontroduction

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Worldwide total smartmobile device market

The figure shows the growth in demand for smart mobile devices

including handhelds, wireless handhelds, and smart cellular phones

through 2006, as estimated by the research firm Canalys.

Accessibility of Information on the Web

• Search engine coverage having decreased

• Unequal access

• Out of date

• Information distribution

• 25 billion indexable web pages as of 2006

• Deep web

• Low metadata use

A Web Search Engine System Structure

1. The crawlers (spiders)

2. The index

3. The search and ranking software

Information Provided by HTML Files

• Contents

• Descriptions (metatags)

• Hyperlinked text

• Hyperlinks

• Keywords

• Page structure

• Page title

• Text with different fonts

• The first sentence

Hyperlink Exploration

The creation of a hyperlink by the author of a web page represents an

implicit endorsement of the page being pointed to. This approach is based

on identifying two important types of web pages for a given topic:

• Authorities, which provide the best source of information on the

topic, and

• Hubs, which provide collections of links to authorities.

Information Retrieval: Relevance Feedback

An initial query is usually a wild guess. Retrieved query results are then

used to help construct a more precise query or modify the database

indexes. Two relevance feedback methods, query modification and

indexing modification, can be used to improve the search.

Information Retrieval: Data Classification

The process finds the common properties among a set of objects in a

database and classifies them into different classes, according to a

classification model.

Information Retrieval: Data Clustering

The process of grouping physical or abstract objects into classes of similar

objects is called clustering or unsupervised classification. The document

clustering could be an alternative method of organizing retrieval results.

Metasearch

Metasearch engines automatically and simultaneously query several

Internet search engines, interpret the results, and display them in a uniform

format.

A metasearch engine

usually consists of three

components:

• dispatch mechanism

• interface agents

• display mechanism

An SQL Approach

This approach views the Web as a huge database, where each record

matches a web page, and designs an SQL-like language to support

effective and flexible searches. For example, the query below finds the

documents about “excursions” near WWW6 homepage.

Content-Based Multimedia Search

The goal of the QBIC —

IBM's Query By Image

Content—project is to

help users find and

retrieve pictures or video

by drawing, painting,

sketching, or using other

graphical means.

Mobile Handheld Devices

A handheld device is a small general-

purpose, programmable, battery-powered

computer that can be held in one hand

of a mobile user.

It is different from a desktop or notebook computer:

• mobility,

• low communication bandwidth, and

• limited computing power and resources

such as memory and batteries.

A Handheld Device System Structure

● a mobile operating system ● a mobile CPU

● a microbrowser ● input/output devices

● memory ● batteries

Mobile users

Instructions

Data

I/O bridge

I/O bus

Wireless adapter

Memory bus

Batteries

Mobile CPU Memory

Mobile OS

I/O devices

Microbrowser

System bus

A Mobile Search Engine System Structure

Fast Search &

Transfer’s mSearch

mobile-search

services works with

general Internet

content in formats

accessible by mobile

devices.

Yahoo! Mobile Search

Search — Search the entire Internet and over a

billion images, optimized for your small

screen.

Local Info — The best source for local

business listings, giving you results based on

where you are.

Instant Messages — Text messaging delivers.

Search for anything you need and get results

back by SMS.

Google Mobile Search

Search — Find exactly what you are looking

for by searching through Google's entire index

of web and mobile web pages. And Google

will fit the pages for your device's smaller

screensize.

Local Listings — Search and locate

everything from restaurants to dry cleaners.

Detecting Web Page Structurefor Adaptive Viewing on Devices

A web page is organized into a two level hierarchy with a thumbnail

representation at the top level for providing a global view and index to a

set of sub-pages at the bottom level for detail information.

Opera's Small-Screen Rendering™

With Small-Screen Rendering™, the page is reformatted to fit inside the

screen width and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling. All the content and functionality is still available, it is only the layout of the page that is changed.

Summary

It is expected the cumulative sales of smartphones will reach 1 billion units

by the first quarter of 2011. Most of the users will use mobile search to

find

mobile pages:

• The technologies used for mobile search are similar to traditional

search.

• Several different languages and incompatible microbrowsers are used

to create and view mobile web pages, which cause confusion and

trouble for mobile search. In the near future, most microbrowsers

will be able to view HTML.

• The major problem faced by mobile search is how well the search

results can be displayed on the small screens of handheld devices.