How People Use the Web in Large Indoor Spaces

We report a preliminary study of mobile Web behaviour in a large indoor retail space. By analysing a Web log collected over a 1 year period at an inner city shopping mall in Sydney, Australia, we found that 1) around 60% of registered Wi-Fi users actively browse the Internet, and the rest 40% do not, with around 10% of these users using Web search engines. Around 70% of this Web activity in the investigated mall come from frequent visitors; 2) the content that indoor users search for is different from the content they consume while browsing; 3) the popularity of future indoor search queries can be predicted with a simple theoretical model based on past queries treated as a weighted directed graph. The work described in this paper underpins applications such as the prediction of users' information needs, retail recommendation systems, and improving the mobile Web search experience.