Mobile Search Engine

1
Mobile Search Engine

• Based on idea presented in paper Data mining for
  personal navigation, Hariharan, G., Fränti, P.,
  Mehta S. (2002)

2
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
users location.
3
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).
4
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.
5
One possible solution

• Use some existing and efficient web search engine
  to get potential links related to users location
  and interests.
• Implement tools for searching location
  information from those links.

6
Test App. Defining search options
WWW -server
GPS
Addr./coords.
Lat, Lon
Lat, Lon
Joensuu
Pizzeria
PDA
Options Pizzeria, Joensuu
7
Test app. extracting data
WWW -server
GPS
Google
Pizzeria, Joensuu
Relevant links
Extracting location info.
PDA
- address
coordinates
Counting distances
Addr. / coords.
8
Test app. handling data
WWW -server
GPS
Creating result list. Ordered by distance.
Pizzaspecial, puh Pizzeria Al Mooro, puh Pizza
Express Cafe, puh ...
Save to database (optional)
PDA
Show results to user
Result database
9
Phone application
10
City Search Engine Demo

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

11
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.

12
Software solutions
For every link

• 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

13
Software solutions
For every result list item

• 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)

14
Test app. problems
Search result relevance problem

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

15
Test app. problems
Creating serach results

• If we find an address from a web page, how to
  find descriptive information related to that
  address?
• How to measure search results relevance (to the
  user)? We should get rid of non-relevant search
  results.