A Mobile World Wide Web Search Engine Wen-Chen Hu Department of Computer Science University of North Dakota Grand Forks, ND

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

troduction Introduction 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Accessibility of Information on the Web Search engine coverage having decreased Unequal access Out of date Information distribution 25 billion indexable web pages as of 2006 Deep web Low metadata use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

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 Structure for 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 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.