SMS-based contextual web search

SMS-based web search is different from traditional web search in that the final response to a search query is limited to a very small number of bytes (typically 1-2 SMS messages, 140 bytes each). SMS-based web search is also a non-interactive search problem where the user has to specify a query and obtain a response in one round of search. Enabling search with with such constraints is challenging. Several search engines have developed SMS-based search capabilities in recent years and many of these search engines are limited in their recognized topics (phone, address, location, weather etc.), involve a human in the loop or apply to only specific types of search queries. We describe a simple generic approach to extracting results for both well-known and arbitrary topics. We have implemented our prototype system SMSFind and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. While the underlying mechanisms we present are by no means perfect, we show that our system returns appropriate responses for a range of topics not covered by existing systems.