Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries J Yi, F Maghoul & J Pedersen, Yahoo Inc, 7th International Conference on World Wide Web, 2008 Manu Shukla 7/19/2009

2 Introduction Query patterns derived from 20 million English sample search queries Submitted over a 2 month period in second half of 2007 using Yahoo! Mobile oneSearch ( applicationhttp://m.yahoo.com 2.7 billion mobile users worldwide by end of 2006, 4 billion by 2010, 243 million US users in June 2007 Authors compare and contrast search patterns between US and International, and between queries from various search interfaces

3 Yahoo! oneSearch

4 oneSearch First analyses the concept and the intent of the query Federated search service with 3 application interfaces, XHTML/WAP browser, java application and SMS text messaging interface Results of first order analysis

5 Query Distributions

6 Query Duplicates Plot of query repetitions and the number of corresponding queries Follows the power law distribution exhibiting a remarkably linear pattern on a log-log plot

7 Query Categorization Use a logistic regression based classifier using an in-house taxonomy with 821 nodes and maximum depth of 6

8 Query Categories Entertainment broken down further by interest Besides topical, break down queries by intent –9-10% have local intent –5% URL or navigational queries Similar patterns between US and International in terms of topical queries

9 Categorization by Application

10 Categorization by Application

11 Conclusions A unique insight into mobile queries from a large data set Unfortunately, no details on how they determined user intent from query Shows that the nature of mobile queries change between devices and interfaces Queries with local intent increase when device has less graphical capability and are better suited to spatio-temporal targeting