The Use of Social Context to Enhance Mobile Web Search Experience

Web access, especially through search, is by far one of the most popular operations performed on mobile devices. It is very interesting how the Mobile and Social worlds have significantly converged in many interesting ways, the least of which is the ability to simply access social networks on the move. However, much literature indicates how search results, and in specific mobile search is far from satisfactory in terms of meeting user intent and need. This has ultimately led to the introduction of context-aware web search to obtain more adequate results. In this research, we focus on using social context obtained from user social networks to refine search queries. Our initial target is to propose a system that will ultimately demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating this type of context when conducting mobile search. We also describe how we will utilize this system to classify user queries issued on mobile devices to determine the degree by which social context used, to then reformulate the queries by augmenting relevant context, and then finally ranking the results to match user needs.