Understanding and Supporting Cross-Device Web Search for Exploratory Tasks with Mobile Touch Interactions

Mobile devices enable people to look for information at the moment when their information needs are triggered. While experiencing complex information needs that require multiple search sessions, users may utilize desktop computers to fulfill information needs started on mobile devices. Under the context of mobile-to-desktop web search, this article analyzes users’ behavioral patterns and compares them to the patterns in desktop-to-desktop web search. Then, we examine several approaches of using Mobile Touch Interactions (MTIs) to infer relevant content so that such content can be used for supporting subsequent search queries on desktop computers. The experimental data used in this article was collected through a user study involving 24 participants and six properly designed cross-device web search tasks. Our experimental results show that (1) users’ mobile-to-desktop search behaviors do significantly differ from desktop-to-desktop search behaviors in terms of information exploration, sense-making and repeated behaviors. (2) MTIs can be employed to predict the relevance of click-through documents, but applying document-level relevant content based on the predicted relevance does not improve search performance. (3) MTIs can also be used to identify the relevant text chunks at a fine-grained subdocument level. Such relevant information can achieve better search performance than the document-level relevant content. In addition, such subdocument relevant information can be combined with document-level relevance to further improve the search performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods relies on the sufficiency of click-through documents. (4) MTIs can also be obtained from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The subdocument feedbacks inferred from this set of MTIs even outperform the MTI-based subdocument feedback from the click-through documents.