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 user’s 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 user’s 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 Pizzaspecial, puh … Pizzeria Al Mooro, puh… Pizza Express Cafe, puh… ... Creating result list. Ordered by distance. 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 page’s 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 result’s relevance (to the user)? We should get rid of non-relevant search results.