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Laid Back Searching
Matt Jones
The New Zealand Digital Library & HCI Lab
Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ.
www.nzdl.org
Computing for the human pace
Thanks to:
MDX– George Buchanan
UCL– Harold Thimbleby
UCT SA– Gary Marsden
Waikato NZ– Preeti Jain, Sebastian Dusterwald,
Brendan Waugh Google CA
– Craig Nevill-Manning, Google Research Lab
Searching
Pervasive activity.– 150 million queries a day
at Google Most done in “sit-
forward” mode
Sit forward+
+Special issue of ACM TOCHI, June 2002, New Usability
Lean back
Laid-back
Embedded-– Mobile– Handheld– User in control– Non-disruptive– Persistent– …– …
Exploring “laid-back” in search context
Users’ search needs Issues with sit-forward
mobile solution. Laid-back search scheme
– Implementation and issues– Evaluation
Thinking of things to search for…
Problems
Notes lost Making sense of notes Context lost Time
An obvious solution..?
Handheld mobile search today.
Usability impact of small screen & Google
– WAP hopeless– Palm-sized encouraging– When users fail, they fail
badly.
Details in Matt Jones et al, “Sorting our Searching”, Proceedings 4th International Symposium on Mobile HCI, Pisa, September 2002.
High cost of exploring a search result
Improving search usability
Simple measures to ensure better search result selection– Reduce navigation within
search results– More information with search
results – e.g., is this a small screen adapted page?
– Adapt search results
Reducing overload
PowerBrowser– Filtering process– Search results
only shown when user decides number is manageable
Orkut Buyukkokten et al Focused Web Searching with PDAs. In Proceedings of the Ninth World Wide Web Conference, 2000.
Reducing scrolling and providing more information
WebTwig– Outliner
view of search results
– Provides search result context
Matt Jones et al, “Sorting our Searching”, Proceedings 4th International Symposium on Mobile HCI, Pisa Sept 2002
Adapting web pages
WAP Accordion
summarisation (PowerBrowser)
So, why not right there, right then?
Socially disruptive? Disrupts prime goals? Too much likelihood of
frustration, ineffectiveness?
Laid-back scheme
Recording searches
Recording searches
Queries can be entered and edited over time.
Simple duplication checking carried out– More advanced post-entry
processing under investigation
Processing the queries
Transfer queries to server PC via cradle or local wireless connection
Processing queries
Search requests sent to Google
i results to depth j retrieved (simple Web crawling)
Transferred back to handheld computer
Flexible use of the search results
Handheld Offline PC online Handheld online
Proposed benefits
Guaranteeing searches Persistence of search
process More considered use of
search results– Cf. hyperactivity of simple
online search Filling dead-time
Evaluation
Approach is very simple– But, will it really provide a
satisfying and useful integration of online and offline worlds?
Initial User study underway– System given to several
users to see if/how they use it over a number of weeks
Evaluation
Technical issues– Storage limitations on
handheld computers E.g. IPAQ 32MB
– Large amounts of storage required for offline viewing E.g. 2 queries, 10 results
each, to depth 2 needed 10.5MB
Possible solutions
Compression (already done in commercial Avantgo.com service)
Summarisation/ pruning of content
Offline/online combination
Further work
Query post-processing – E.g., automatic combination/
suggestion
Search result processing– Presentation– Grouping
Implicit searching– From other handheld computer
data
Interesting parallels
MotorWizzy digital courier, South Africa
Knowledge-Base Agents
Brad Myer’s Pebbles work
http://www.wizzy.org.za/
Aridor, Y., Carmel. D., Maarek, Y. S., Soffer, A. & Lempel, R.
Knowledge encapsulation for focused search from pervasive devices.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) January 2002 Volume 20, Issue 1
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pebbles/
Conclusions
Laid-back computing is a “third-way”
Exploring broader ideas via search application
Working paper at– www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~mattj/laidback.pdf
Come and help us…Visit laid-back NZ! (www.purenz.com)
