Mobile Search Engine

Based on idea presented in paper Data mining for personal navigation, Hariharan,

G., Fränti, P., Mehta S. (2002)

Introduction

What if we could use location as a search option?

Task:

To implement a www -search engine for mobile devices.

To study if it is possible to utilize www to find targets and services near user’s location.

Location information in www documents

In order to locate targets and services we should be able to find location information from web pages.

Some studies exists: Geospatial Mapping and Navigation of the Web (McCurley, 2001),

Paikkatiedon käyttö web-dokumenteissa (Vänskä, 2004).

Location information in www documents

• Geotags (GeoTags, 2005).

• Address -tags (World Wide Web Consortium, 2005).

• Address.

• Postal code.

• Phone number.

• Well-known places

Using address- and geotags is very rare. In practice it is necessary to find addresses inside the text.

One possible solution

• Use some existing and efficient web search engine to get potential links related to user’s location and interests.

• Implement tools for searching location information from

those links.

Test App. : Defining search options

Lat, Lon

Lat, Lon

GPS

PDA

WWW -server

Addr./coords.

Joensuu

Pizzeria

Options: Pizzeria,

Joensuu

Test app. : extracting dataWWW -server

GooglePizzeria, Joensuu

Relevant links

Extracting location info.

- address

Addr. / coords.

coordinates

Counting distances

GPS

PDA

Test app. : handling dataWWW -server

GPS

PDA

Result database

Creating result list. Ordered by distance.

Save to database (optional)

Show results to user

Pizzaspecial, puh …

Pizzeria Al Mooro, puh…

Pizza Express Cafe, puh…

...

Phone application

City Search Engine Demo

• http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/paikka/suomi/suomi.php

Software solutions• Implemention of module that executes

Google-search with search options ”keyword” (user defined) and ”area” (commune(s) within certain distance from the user). Module returns list of links.

Software solutions

• Get the plain text out from the html-document • Create a table consisting all numbers and words in the

document.• Going through the table, try to detect street names. With

the help of address/coordinate db, try to create addresses.• Try to extract descriptive information related to addresses.• After all links have been gone through, gather all results to

result list

For every link :

Software solutions

• Try to evaluate relevance of list items

• Arrange the list by distance (maybe combined with relevance?)

• Delete multiple occurances

• Show results to the user

• (Save results)

For every result list item:

Test app. problems

• Web page can include one or several useful results but at the same time it can include information of totally different targets and services.

• Keyword -matching information can be found from the page, but the keyword can have other meaning in current web page’s context.

• Keyword -matching information and addresses have been found from the page but there is no relation between those two.

Search result relevance problem:

Test app. problems

• If we find an address from a web page, how to find descriptive information related to that address?

• How to measure search result’s relevance (to the user)? We should get rid of non-relevant search results.

Creating serach results: