Examining Mobile Search and Re-finding Behaviour

Mobile search has been a target of research for many years as it is challenging, multi-level and rapidly increasing in use, much like the mobile platforms themselves. This work examines the aforementioned subject from two of its aspects; mobile re-finding behaviour and queries' contextual information. Re-finding behaviour is an well-known phenomenon amongst the big search engines. It describes the tendency people have to search for contents of a web page they have already viewed before. This also applies to internet access through mobile environment. Studies have shown that identifying and exploiting this phenomenon can lead to improving the availability of information while reducing the cost of access. However, according to previous work, the phenomenon is declining and with the work of this thesis, we inspect its current state. In parallel with that, we examine mobile search semantics in the context of topic, time and location. Analysis on this contextual information helps us better understand users' online behaviour. For the purposes of the project, an Android Logging Framework was developed which was used to perform a live user study with 14 smartphone users, for the duration of a month. Results showed a 5,52% of average re-finding behaviour amongst the participants, while revealing patterns concerning their search queries. Topic of the searches is influenced by the time of the day, as well as the location of the users. Finally, a high number of searches have migrated from the browser to a richer and more intuitive environment, that of topic-specific applications.

Subject

mobile search
re-finding
query topic
query location

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Student theses

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master thesis

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Gartaganis_Orestis_-_MScThesis.pdf

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