Authors: Maryam Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja Date of Publication: August 2007 Name of Speaker: Venkatasomeswara Pawan Addanki

 Study on how users do mobile search will help to improve user experience and increase in mobile service usage.  Mobile search: Google search engine tailored for mobile devices like PDA, cell phones.  The study of 1 million page-view requests from Google logs during one month period, which were done from mobile devices.

 Only wireless mobile requests was taken for consideration.  The data was only from one US mobile carrier.  Only web queries on mobile was only criteria.  Grouped request into sessions, where each session is series of queries by single user within short range of time.  Session consists of 3 phases  Formulating query  Browsing the search results.  Viewing the search results.

 Average (cell)mobile query was 2.56 words and 16.8 characters, which is similar to PDA and computer based queries.  Mobile(cell) phone 10 key multitap requires average of 40.9 key presses per query, which is double the effort on normal keyboard.  An estimated 39.8 seconds to type query on cell phone.  PDAs queries average input time decreased to 30.1 seconds.

 The popular was the adult category.  A study reported conventional web search had decline by 50 % in adult queries from 1997 to  Adult queries on conventional web searches account only to 10% of all queries in 2001.

 Wireless search is a more recent boom (in ) than desktop search, it would also follow the same trend as Desktop search. Percentage of adult queries will decline as service would attract more users.  Authors speculated that people feel more comfortable querying adult term on private devices.

 Studying the distribution of queries across a broad set of topics is one method to examine the diversity of search requests received.  Method2: what percentage of the total query volume the top-N unique queries accounts for.

 Dataset of 50,000 queries from cell phones and PDA searches collected during one month.  The top mobile query accounted for about 0.8 percent of all wireless queries.  Top 1000 mobile queries accounted for about 17 percent of all cell phone based queries.  PDA queries had more variation and accounted for 13.5 percent of all queries.

 Mobile queries are more static and of same queries are searched.  Reasons: ◦ PDA and cell phone browsers doesn’t support full HTML capabilities as Desktop, which leads to few tailored queries which work on mobiles. ◦ The user base is small for wireless and mobile. The small user base may share same profiles.

 User after entering the query, gets 10 search results on the mobile.  Most users find the relevant search results in first page or chose not to look further.  About 10.4 percent of queries had requested to display more than initial set of search results.  More than 50 percent of search results led to click.  It takes an average user around 30 seconds to scan the search results.

 A user might choose or modify the original query.  Average number of queries per session is 2.  Query pairs: Two queries are said to be pairs if they are searched in the same session.  Around 66.3 percent of all query pairs in a session fell in same category.  Moreover, Second query was refinement of first query 56.7 percent of the time.

 The study of 2007 showed some excellent results of how users search on mobile devices. There were some interesting changes from year 2005 study.  Some of the changes being: ◦ Users types faster ◦ More users are clicking ◦ More exploration with a session ◦ Less Homogeneous queries ◦ More High-end devices

 User types faster: ◦ Time from requesting the google front page to submitting a query has decreased from 66.3 to 44.8 seconds in 2007.

 More Users are clicking ◦ In 2005, less than 10 percent of queries with atleast one click on a search result. ◦ In 2007, the percent of queries with atleast one click, was more than 50 percent. ◦ Request for more search results increased from 8.5 to 10 percent.  Factors for increase:  Drastic improvements in transcoder technology.  Secondly, reduction in time to retrieve the search results.

 Less static queries: ◦ Diversity of queries increased ◦ In 2007, top query accounted for 0.8 percent of all queries, as opposed to 1.2 percent in ◦ Measuring the cumulative frequency of the top 1,000 queries from a random set of more than 50,000 mobile queries in 2005 and 2007, a decrease from 22 to 17 percent.

 More High end devices  More adult queries: ◦ Better transcoder improvements. ◦ It may reverse, as it did in wired networks. In conclusion, It can be said that users spend same amount of words/characters for queries on mobile phone.