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