laid back searching matt jones the new zealand digital library & hci lab department of computer...

Laid Back Searching

Matt Jones

The New Zealand Digital Library & HCI Lab

Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ.

always@acm.org

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)