An Evaluation of Gisting in Mobile Search

Abstract

Mobile devices suffer from limited screen real-estate and restricted text input capabilities. In the recent past these limitations have greatly effected the usability of many mobile Internet applications [1], largely because little effort has been typically made to take account of the special features of the mobile Internet. These limitations are especially problematic for mobile search-engines: they restrict the number of results that can be displayed per screen and impact the type of queries that are likely to be provided. Nevertheless, most attempts to provide mobile search engines have involved making only simplistic adaptations to standard search interfaces. For example, fewer results per page are returned and the ‘snippet’ text associated with each result may be truncated [2]. We believe that more fundamental adaptations are necessary if search technology is to succeed in the mobile space. In this paper we focus on the snippet text issue and we argue that providing paragraphs of descriptive text alongside each result is a luxury that does not make sense in the context of mobile device limitations. We describe how the I-SPY system [3] can track and record past queries that have resulted in the selection of a given result page and we argue that these related queries can be used to help users understand the context of a search result in place of more verbose snippet text.