Augmenting Mobile Search Engines to Leverage Context Awareness

Mobile phones are becoming the chosen platforms for web access, with a forecast that over the coming decade more users will connect to the internet through mobile than conventional desktop computers. Internet search is likely going to remain one of the major ways to find information and services on the web. In order to provide satisfactory usability, mobile searches will have to take into consideration the nature of handsets. Being both pervasive and person-centric they continuously capture information about users and their context. Context awareness can enhance the mobile search experience by augmenting user queries with context information captured through the handset´s sensors. In this paper we propose a unified architecture supporting context-awareness in mobility and show how it can be applied to mobile searches. Based on real life contextual data captured from handsets we discuss design approaches and end-user benefits of making mobile searches more context-aware.