WO2007118424A1

WO2007118424A1 - Web search on mobile devices

Info

Publication number: WO2007118424A1
Application number: PCT/CN2007/001212
Authority: WO
Inventors: Gary Xiaoliang Zhang
Original assignee: Zhang, Sheng
Priority date: 2006-04-13
Filing date: 2007-04-13
Publication date: 2007-10-25

Abstract

A method for web search on a mobile device is disclosed. In one embodiment, the mobile device receives a search request and transmits the search request to a server. The server performs a web search based on the received search request, fetches the pages matching the search request, and converts the pages into one or more thumbnails. The mobile device receives the thumbnails from the server, and displays the thumbnails on the screen of the mobile device.

Description

WEB SEARCH ON MOBILE DEVICES

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present invention relates to a method, an apparatus and a system for web search. In particular, it relates to a method, an apparatus and a system for web search on mobile devices.

BACKGROUND

Web search on internet-based contents is currently carried out on mobile devices, such as mobile phones, by Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology.

While WAP may enable a user to perform the web search through the internet-based search engine, the web pages found by the search engine may not be properly displayed in the screen of the mobile phone. This is because the web pages, prepared and formatted for display on the PC monitors, usually contain contents in different format and layouts. For example, a typical web page may include texts, graphics, audio/video clips, flashes, animations, as well hyperlinks. As the screen of a mobile phone is much smaller than that of a PC monitor, and that the mobile phones operating system are not fully compatible to HTML format, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to display the contents of the web pages on a mobile phone, hence the user may not enjoy the benefit to obtain the full information included in the web pages.

Presently, one approach to solve this problem is to convert the web pages into pure text based pages, as what basically provided by WAP technology, so as to convey the information of the searched and located web pages to a mobile phone user.

While the pure-text content provides certain levels of information, it is far from satisfaction to mobile phone users. By converting a web page into a pure- text based content, the contents in non-text format, such as graphic, videos and hyperlinks as well as the layout of the web pages are removed. Without such information, web searches may lack sufficient details hence may not meet the search the requirements.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS These and other aspects and advantages of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram showing a method of performing a web search via a mobile device, according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 2 is a schematic view showing a mobile device displaying a thumbnail under one display mode according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 3 is a schematic view showing a mobile device displaying a selected portion of the thumbnail shown in Fig. 2;

Fig. 4 is a screenshot showing a thumbnail under another display mode according to an embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 5 is a screenshot showing a selected portion of the thumbnail shown in of Fig. 4;

Fig. 6 is a screenshot showing a selection screen of the thumbnail shown in of Fig. 4;

Fig. 7 is a screenshot showing contents displayed according the selection made shown in Fig. 6;

Fig. 8 is flow chart showing a method of web search on a mobile device according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 9 is a flow chart showing a method of providing one type of page view according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 10 is a flow chart showing a method of providing another type of page view according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 11 is a flow chart showing a method of accessing the information at a mobile phone under a search request according to one embodiment of the present invention;

Fig. 12 is a flow chart showing a method of accessing the information at a mobile phone under the search request, according to another embodiment of the present invention. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram showing a method 100 of performing a web search via a mobile device, according to one embodiment of the present invention. A mobile device, such as mobile phone 110 is used to conduct a search and receive a search request. Firstly, a mobile search engine home page 112, for example "XYZ Mobile Search Engine", is shown on mobile phone 110 for a user to input a search query. When a search query, such as a key word "Moonbuggies" is provided, the search query is processed by mobile phone 110 and transmitted to a server 120 via a wireless network 124. Server 120, which may be connected to the internet, performs a web search based on the search query of ""Moonbuggies" through public search engines. When the search hits certain matches, such as web pages containing information relevant to the keyword "Moonbuggies", the server 120 records the matches, and converts the web pages into one or more thumbnails, such as thumbnail 130, and transmits the thumbnail 130 back to mobile phone 110. Thumbnail 130 is then displayed on mobile phone 110, as shown in Fig. 2.

Depending on the actual contents of the web pages, the layout or format of the thumbnail may vary. In a typical situation, thumbnail 130 may contain information in various formats, such as pictures 132, texts 134, hyperlinks 136, etc. As the web pages are designed for display on a PC monitor, which may be typically 10 inches to 19 inches in size, the thumbnail 130 converted from the web page and displayed on mobile phone 130, which has a screen of about 1 to 2 inches in size, may not show all the details of the contents of the web page. Typical examples of the contents which may not be sufficiently clear on the mobile phone screen, may include texts 134.

However, by displaying the thumbnail 130, a great deal of other information of the web page is conveyed to the user. For example, by converting the web page to a thumbnail, the layout of the web page is retained. This will provide the user a same overall feeling of what the original web page looks like, even only through a first glance.

Upon converting the web page into thumbnail 130, which provides the user a substantially same experience of a PC-based web search, the system further provides additional aids to enable user to easy allocate the information on the web page, which are relevant to the search query of "Moonbuggies". In one example, the relevant sections of the web page, which contain the key word "Moonbuggies", are highlighted as boxed or framed regions 140 (labeled as frame "1") and 142 (labeled as frame "2"). On top of the thumbnail, selection bar 150 to the highlighted sections 140 and 142 are provided. When the user selects tag "1" from selection bar 150, contents 160 in framed region 140 is displayed, as shown in Fig. 3, in a manner clear enough for the user to read.

Embodiments of the present invention also provide a method of separating and/or extracting navigational links from the web pages and the thumbnails, which does not require any special abilities or software/hard reconfigurations on the mobile phone side. In one embodiment, the web pages are rendered entirely on the server side, and sent to the mobile phone as a single piece image, with the point of interest (POI) regions drawn on top of the image. Thus, it can be easily displayed by any WAP browsers, even if the WAP browsers do not even support image links, image maps, and table layouts. By separating the links but maintaining a one-to-one correspondence between the web pages and the thumbnails, only the most basic and standard browser is required on the mobile phone for the user to search and access the information on the web pages.

In one embodiment, the thumbnail is further provided with a view mode selection bar 152 which includes the options of viewing the thumbnail in a "Point Of Interest (POI) mode" (Fig. 2) and in "Map mode", as shown in Fig. 4

Fig. 4 is a screenshot showing an embodiment of the present invention in which, the web page is rendered to provide an alternative option for the user to access the information. As shown in Fig. 4, upon converting the web page into thumbnail 130, the system provides a grid 170 which virtually divides the thumbnail 130 into a number of segments, labeled as segments A1 , A2, A3, B1 , B2, B3, C1 , C2 and C3. These segments therefore map the corresponding portions of the thumbnail, hence the corresponding portions of the web page. A Tag bar 180 containing tags corresponding to each segment is provided on the thumbnail 130. When a particular tag is selected, for example tag "B1", the segment corresponding to "B1" is displayed, as shown in Fig. 5 which is a "zoom-in" view of thumbnail 130 showing the contents in segment B1. Depending on the contents of the particular segment, further "zoom-in" operation may be performed, in a similar mannAltematively, the user may select the "Content" tag in tag bar 180 by which, a segment selection screen 190 is displayed, as shown in Fig. 6. Segment selection screen 190 provides the user a further flexible control to select particular segments to be further accessed. In this regard, it should be appreciated that the user is able to decide which of the particular segment(s) he may wish to access, by viewing the thumbnail 130 (Fig. For example, by viewing the thumbnail 130, the user decides to access the information under segments A2 and B2. He may first select the "Content" tag located on top of the thumbnail 130, and have the segment selection screen 190 displayed on the mobile phone screen. Segment selection screen 190 enables the user to select the segments of interest by, for example, checking the relevant boxes A2 and B2, and uncheck the rest of the boxes. Upon clicking "OK" button, the content in the selected segments A2 and B2 is displayed, as shown in Fig. 7.

Fig. 8 is a flow chart showing a method 300 of web search on a mobile device according to one embodiment of the present invention. Firstly, as shown in block 302, a search request is initiated by a mobile phone user, and the request is forwarded to a server. Upon receipt of the request, the server performs the web search and fetches the pages matching the search quest, as shown in block 304. The server then creates, as shown in block 306, an in- memory rendition of the matching pages using, for example, a sophisticated HTML rendering engine (as used by mainstream HTML browsers), based on the minimum page width required to render the page correctly without horizontal scrolling and content distortion. This is to ensure the scaling ratio from the large pages to the smaller thumbnail be kept at minimal. Thereafter, as shown in blocks 308, 310 and 312, the server extracts all the displayable text contents, and assembles these text contents into "boxes" or "frames" which may be logical units of text contents, and records the positions and/or coordinates of each box for the purpose of display.

Through a profiling system and method, as shown in block 314, the server obtains information of the mobile phone and identify the profile, and hardware / software configurations of the mobile phone. These information may include the type, brand and model of the mobile phone, its screen dimension, color depth, and storage capacity, etc. Based on these information, the original rendition is scaled into a thumbnail best suite for the mobile phone from which the profile information is obtained. In the mean time, the original renditions are retained in the server, as shown in blocks 316 and 318. To achieve better clarity, a bi-cubic interpolation on the original rendition may be performed. Bicubic Interpolation is an advanced method to scale bitmap images. With this method, output pixel values are calculated from a weighted average of pixels in the nearest 4-by-4 neighborhood. This results in the highest-quality image that's most faithful to the original. To create sharp-looking thumbnails, this method is used to scale down the original image. Fuzziness caused by the scaling, is any, may be removed by applying a sharpening filter. Once the thumbnails are created, additional selection and/or navigation aids, may be provided to the mobile phone user. These additional selection and/or navigation aids may include displaying a Point Of Interest (POI) view and/or a Map view on the mobile phone by, adding additional elements, such as layers on the thumbnails, as shown in block 320.

Fig. 9 is a flow chart showing a method 400 of providing the POI view as one additional selection and/or navigation aids, according to one embodiment of the present invention. To generate a POI view, a string search is performed on the "boxes" or "frames" collected by the server in the previous steps, as shown in block 402. Boxes or frames that contain the keywords provided in the search request is identified, block 404. During this step, overlapping boxes / frames in the screen space are merged, shown in block 406. Translucent layers are then created with shape defined by the identified boxes / frames, numbered, and drawn on top of the thumbnail, shown in block 408. Depending the original rendition's coordinate space, the boxes / frames may not be in a proper size, e.g. too large. An affine transform to the boxes / frames becomes necessary, as show in block 410, so as to map these boxes / frames into the thumbnails' coordinate space.

Fig. 10 is a flow chart showing a method 500 of providing the Map view as one alternate selection and/or navigation aids, according to one embodiment of the present invention. To generate the Map view, a grid is provided, shown in block 502, and overlapped on the thumbnail (block 504). The thumbnail is now divided into sections by the grid.

With the POI view and/or the Map view, the user is now provided with selection and/or navigation aids to access the web page contents which satisfy his search request. Depending on the configurations or capabilities of the mobile phone, the thumbnails may be encoded into graphic format files, for example a JPEG format or GIF format, and embedded into the images to be displayed on the mobile phone. This greatly reduces the image size. One particular advantage of processing the thumbnails in this manner is the bandwidth saving - typical belief is that images should be avoided at all cost in order to minimize bandwidth. For a mobile phone having a typical 176x208 screen, a thumbnail to be displayed on the mobile phone has a file size between about 5KB to 7KB using JPEG compression. On the other hand, the average size of a web page today can be around 200KB to 500KB, with some with more graphical contents may easily extend into the Megabytes realm. Thus, even if the mobile phone possesses the ability to render the page faithfully as on the PCs, it cannot bypass the excessive download mandated by client-side rendering. Not only this is expensive, slow, it may not even work because most mobile operators incur size limits through their WAP gateways.

On the contrary, solutions provided by embodiments of the present invention produce display image of near constant size, regardless of the type of the web page being visited.

Fig. 11 is a flow chart showing a method 600 of accessing the information at a mobile phone under the search request, according to one embodiment of the present invention. In this embodiment, information are provided under the POI mode.

In the event that the information displayed on the mobile phone screen is not clear enough, a user may select a "zoom-in" view by, for example, selecting a region of interest, as shown in block 602. The server then identifies the corresponding region and crop out this region, as shown in block 604. The cropped region is resized to match the screen of the mobile phone, and displayed on the mobile phone screen. The image displayed will offer a higher display quality.

Fig. 12 is a flow chart showing a method 700 of accessing the information at a mobile phone under the search request, according to another embodiment of the present invention. In this embodiment, information are provided under the POI mode, and the text content within one or more highlighted boxes / frames is to be accessed. Firstly, at blocks 702 and 704, the boxes / frames lie under the selected region are identified, and text within the identified boxes / frames are extracted. It is possible that not all the content may fit within the selected region. To preserve the integrity of the content, it is preferable that the entire content corresponding the each selected box / frame is extracted. The extracted content is then transformed to a display-friendly format, and forward to the mobile phone for display, as shown in block 706.

If a selected region of the thumbnail corresponds to web pages which contain interactive contents, such as HTML forms, the server may transform the HTML forms into a display-friendly form, store it in a box / frame, and display the box / frame on the thumbnail. When the user selects this particular box / frame, the server forwards the relevant contents to the user in transcoded form. In this connection, it should be appreciates that presently, most mobile phones do not support HTML and usually crashes when given the typical HTML code found on the web. To solve this problem, texts extracted from the HTML are to be fed to a transcoding process to be compliant with WML, XHTML MP, etc. For example, the typical <br> tag, which signals a "line break", does not work on WAP. As such, the <br> tag needs to be transcoded to <br/> for it to be accepted by mobile phone browser.

Embodiments of the present invention described above provide a new and effective solution to enable mobile devices to perform search on any web pages available in the PC-based search engines. In addition to the mobile device users, content providers such as web page developers may also enjoy benefits provided by the present invention.

For example, web pages may be modified with human aided creation to allow for better info-visual mapping. This may be achieved by embedding meta tags in the HTML source. These tags are ignored by the rendering engine but can be picked up by servers operating under the method of the embodiments of the present invention. For example, web developers may use these meta tags to label the different logical sections on their pages, such as headlines, advertisings, entry forms, top stories, etc. Without requiring the web developers to repurpose their sites to mobile users, solutions provided by the present invention may enable a more effective web search, and improve the efficiency of delivering web contents of interests to mobile device users.

The present invention is further advantageous in that, for example, by converting web pages into thumbnails, it enables display of contents in different languages on mobile phones which are not equipped with relevant language packages, plug-ins and/or foreign language character sets. This feature greatly increases the capability of mobile phone usage. In one aspect, a mobile phone needs not to have many foreign language packages to display foreign language texts, hence a low end, low lost mobile phone may perform web searches and access the interested content even if in foreign languages. In another aspect, system resources such as internal/external memories of the mobile phones may be freed up by removing the foreign languages packages, hence mobile device users may also enjoy cost and resource savings from the solutions provided by the present invention.

Although embodiments of the present invention have been illustrated in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and described in the foregoing detailed description, it should be appreciated that the invention is not limited to the embodiments disclosed, and is capable of numerous rearrangements, modifications, alternatives and substitutions without departing from the spirit of the invention.

Claims

1 . A method for web search on a mobile device, comprising the following steps: the mobile device receiving a search request and transmitting the search request to a server; the server performing a web search based on the received search request, fetching the pages matching the search request, and converting the pages into one or more thumbnails; and the mobile device receiving the thumbnails from the server, and displaying the thumbnails on the screen of the mobile device.

2. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the thumbnail contains information in the format of picture, text and hyperlink.

3. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the thumbnail has the same layout with that of the web page.

4. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the step of converting the pages into one or more thumbnails comprising the steps of creating rendition of matching pages to render the pages; extracting displayable text contents from the web pages; assembling theses text contents into logical units of text content; and recording positions of each logical unit.

5. The method according to claim 4, further comprising the steps of profiling the mobile device; and scaling the original rendition in server.

6. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising a step of providing an additional selection for the user.

7. The method according to claim 6, wherein the step of providing an additional selection comprising a step of providing a Point Of Interest (PIO) view or a Map view as an additional selection.

8. The method according to claim 7, wherein the step of providing the PIO view comprising the steps of performing a string search on the logical unit; identifying the logical unit containing key words; merging the logical unit in screen space; creating translucent layers; and affining transform to map the logical unit into thumbnail coordinate space.

9. The method according to claim 7, wherein the step of providing the Map view comprising the steps of generating grids; and overlapping grids on thumbnails.

10. The method according to claim 6, further comprising the steps of cropping out a region based on the user's selection; and resizing the region to match the screen of the mobile.

11. The method according to claim 6, further comprising the steps of identifying a logical unit under a region based on the use's selection; extracting text within the logical unit; and transforming the extracted texts and forwarding them to the mobile device.

12. A system for web search on a mobile device, comprising: the mobile device for receiving a search request, transmitting the search request, and displaying the search result on the screen of the mobile device; and a server for receiving the search request from the mobile device, performing a web search based on the received search request, fetching the pages matching the search request, and converting the pages into one or more thumbnails.

13. The system according to claim 12, wherein the thumbnail contains information in the format of picture, text and hyperlink.

14. The system according to claim 12, wherein the thumbnail has the same layout with that of the web page.

15. The system according to claim 12, wherein the server comprises means for creating rendition of matching pages to render the pages; means for extracting displayable text contents from the web pages; means for assembling theses text contents into logical units of text content; and means for recording positions of each logical unit.

16. The system according to claim 15, wherein the server comprises means for profiling the mobile device; and means for scaling the original rendition.

17. The system according to claim 12, wherein the server comprises means for an additional selection for the user.

18. The system according to claim 17, wherein the server comprises means for providing a Point Of Interest (PIO) view or a Map view as an additional selection.

19. The system according to claim 18, wherein the means for an additional selection for the user further comprises means for performing a string search on the logical unit; means for identifying the logical unit containing key words; means for merging the logical unit in screen space; means for creating translucent layers; and means for affining transform to map the logical unit into thumbnail coordinate space.

20. The system according to claim 18, wherein the means for providing the Map view comprises means for generating grids; and means for overlapping grids on thumbnails.

21. The system according to claim 17, wherein the sever comprises means for cropping out a region based on the user's selection; and means for resizing the region to match the screen of the mobile.

22. The system according to claim 17, wherein the server comprises means for identifying a logical unit under a region based on the use's selection; means for extracting text within the logical unit; and means for transforming the extracted texts and forwarding them to the mobile device.

23. An apparatus for web search on a mobile device comprises: means for receiving a search request from the mobile device; means for performing a web search based on the received search request; means for fetching the pages matching the search request; means for converting the pages into one or more thumbnails; means for sending the thumbnails to the mobile device.

24. The apparatus according to claim 23, further comprises means for creating rendition of matching pages to render the pages; means for extracting displayable text contents from the web pages; means for assembling theses text contents into logical units of text content; and means for recording positions of each logical unit.

25. The apparatus according to claim 24, further comprises means for profiling the mobile device; and means for scaling the original rendition.