Effective Web Searching on Mobile Devices

Web pages with complex layout do not display well on small screens, and require extensive amounts of scrolling, both horizontally and vertically. This quickly leads to disorientation within the page. In order to make optimum use of the small displays on mobile devices for Web browsing and searching, it is necessary to enforce both overview and detail concerns of page viewing. However, this typically requires two different visual renderings. SmartView provides an overview in the form of a zoomed out image of the page, with outlines segmenting it into detail regions; the user can select any of these regions in order to view it separately from the rest of the page. The content in the selected region is reformatted to fit the display, reducing any scrolling to a single direction. SearchMobil extends this approach with the aim of providing support for searching: pages retrieved by a search engine are displayed in an overview that is annotated to show the locations of search terms. 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.

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