Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries

1. Deciphering Mobile Search Patterns: A Study of Yahoo! Mobile Search Queries J Yi, F Maghoul & J Pedersen, Yahoo Inc, 7th International Conference on World Wide Web, 2008 Manu Shukla 7/19/2009

2. Introduction • Query patterns derived from 20 million English sample search queries • Submitted over a 2 month period in second half of 2007 using Yahoo! Mobile oneSearch (http://m.yahoo.com) application • 2.7 billion mobile users worldwide by end of 2006, 4 billion by 2010, 243 million US users in June 2007 • Authors compare and contrast search patterns between US and International, and between queries from various search interfaces

3. Yahoo! oneSearch

4. oneSearch • First analyses the concept and the intent of the query • Federated search service with 3 application interfaces, XHTML/WAP browser, java application and SMS text messaging interface • Results of first order analysis

5. Query Distributions

6. Query Duplicates • Plot of query repetitions and the number of corresponding queries • Follows the power law distribution exhibiting a remarkably linear pattern on a log-log plot

7. Query Categorization • Use a logistic regression based classifier using an in-house taxonomy with 821 nodes and maximum depth of 6

8. Query Categories • Entertainment broken down further by interest • Besides topical, break down queries by intent • 9-10% have local intent • 5% URL or navigational queries • Similar patterns between US and International in terms of topical queries

9. Categorization by Application

10. Categorization by Application

11. Conclusions • A unique insight into mobile queries from a large data set • Unfortunately, no details on how they determined user intent from query • Shows that the nature of mobile queries change between devices and interfaces • Queries with local intent increase when device has less graphical capability and are better suited to spatio-temporal targeting