Efficient browsing of web search results on mobile devices based on block importance model

Abstract

It is expected that more and more people will search the web when they are on the move. Though conventional search engines can be directly visited from mobile devices with web browsing capabilities, the information is not as conveniently accessible from a handheld device as it is from desktops. Existing information discovery mechanisms for searching the web are not well-suited to mobile devices. In this paper, a block importance model is employed to assign importance values to different segments of a web page, in order to extract and present more condensed search results to mobile users. Based on the block importance model, three presentations for displaying the result pages in different levels of detail have been designed to reduce both the number of user interactions and the overall search time. A set of user study experiments have been carried out to compare the three presentations and a commercial service on typical mobile devices. Experimental results show that our approaches can help users to explore web search results more efficiently. 1