SearchMobil: Web Viewing and Search for Mobile Devices

Natasa Milic-Frayling, Ralph Sommerer, Kerry Rodden, Alan F. Blackwell

Abstract: Web pages with complex layout do not display well on the small screens of mobile devices, requiring extensive amounts of scrolling. SearchMobil aims to support Web searching on mobile devices via flexible presentation of pages retrieved by a search engine. A page is partitioned into logical sections whose boundaries are displayed on a zoomed out image of the page. Individual sections are annotated to show the location of the search terms. The user can select a section in order to view it separately from the rest of the page. We carried out a user study to compare SearchMobil's page representation to the one currently used in Pocket Internet Explorer, with a special emphasis on exploring the impact of page structure and query term selection on its effectiveness.