Search patterns & Google at WWW2009

An interesting paper from Google presented at the World Wide Web  
Conference (WWW2009).

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Title: Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based  
comparison of search users on different devices by Maryam Kamvar,  
Melanie Kellar, Rajan Patel and Ya Xu.
Abstract:
We present a logs-based comparison of search patterns across three  
platforms: computers, iPhones and conventional mobile phones. Our  
goal is to understand how mobile search users differ from computer- 
based search users, and we focus heavily on the distribution and  
variability of tasks that users perform from each platform. The  
results suggest that search usage is much more focused for the  
average mobile user than for the average computer-based user.  
However, search behavior on high-end phones resembles computer-based  
search behavior more so than mobile search behavior. A wide variety  
of implications follow from these findings. First, there is no single  
search interface which is suitable for all mobile phones. We suggest  
that for the higherend phones, a close integration with the standard  
computer-based interface (in terms of personalization and available  
feature set) would be beneficial for the user, since these phones  
seem to be treated as an extension of the users' computer. For all  
other phones, there is a huge opportunity for personalizing the  
search experience for the user's "mobile needs", as these users are  
likely to repeatedly
===

Full paper: http://dragoman.org/2009reg.html#UserIface-1

In brief, their study shows that iPhone users search like Desktop  
users, which is quite different from other mobile users.

Regards,
Yeliz
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School of Computer Science
The University of Manchester
Manchester
M13 9PL

URL: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~yesilady/
Tel:  +44 (0) 161 275 6239
Fax: +44 (0) 845 139 5599
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Received on Thursday, 23 April 2009 13:35:10 UTC