Efficient Information Seeking on a Mobile Device

Interaction with a mobile device remains difficult because of the inherent physical limitations of the devices – they are small. This difficulty is particularly evident for mobile search. If documents were extensively interlinked then fewer searches might be needed, and browsing might be improved. If these links targeted a best entry point (BEP) within a document from which the user should start reading and not the start of the document then scrolling and unnecessary reading of irrelevant material could also be reduced. We call this a One Search Only system because the information seeking task could potentially be reduced to a single search followed by browsing. Automatic link discovery systems might be used to achieve this extensive interlinking so we propose extensions to the INEX Link-the-Wiki task to accommodate anchor-to-BEP link discovery and discuss assessment and evaluation. Finally we propose a mobile user interface and discuss how to measure its performance, and suggest INEX 2008 adopt this as the Interactive Track experiment.