Megan Fox
Gary Price
Fox and Price presented a fast-paced overview of the current state of mobile search services and technologies. Mobile search services are typically provided either through a tool downloaded onto the mobile device by the carrier or by using the device's web browser as a portal to off-device search interfaces. Some of the device-based tools are carrier-specific and others are carrier-agnostic. Most mobile device searching tends to be "ready reference" type questions; i.e., looking for a specific answer rather than for a plethora of results. Search providers try to accommodate this by aggregating results from multiple resources to try to provide a useful answer; e.g., a search for "New York City" may return weather, a city guide, news items, etc., in that order.
They used a term I wasn't previously familiar with ... "Snippets" are stripped-down versions of "widgets" (which themselves are stripped-down versions of "pages"). "Snippets" can be included on your cell phone "home" page to provide certain tpyes of information without you having to ask for it.
Some of the key players in this arena are the usual search service providers (such as Yahoo and Google) that now have a mobile interface. Others are "pure" mobile search providers; e.g., 4INFO and Medio.
A key difficulty of searching via a mobile device is the difficulty of input. Some techniques being used to address this are ...
- picture-based searching: (a) you take a picture of a street sign with your phone camera and submit it to a search to find nearby restaurants or (b) you take a picture of a product UPC code and the search returns price information for various vendors
- voice-based searching: you speak your search
- predictive text completion: based on terms you or others have searched for before
- directory/browse interfaces in addition to raw search
- location-based searching: the search knows where you are
- social searching; e.g., StumbleUpon
They also described a service (whose name I can't remember at the moment) that will "listen in" on cell phone conversations you give it permission to do so, will try to determine your information needs (e.g., "where shall we have lunch?" "how about Italian?"), and will then text you a response (e.g., nearby Italian restaurants).
Presentation will be available online at http://web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile/ .
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