Cross-Device Search

Abstract

Ownership and use of multiple devices such as desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets is increasing rapidly. Search is popular and people often perform search tasks that span device boundaries. Understanding how these devices are used and how people transition between them during information seeking is essential in developing search support for a multi-device world. In this paper, we study search across devices and propose models to predict aspects of cross-device search transitions. We characterize multi-device search across four device types, including aspects of search behavior on each device (e.g., topics of interest) and characteristics of device transitions. Building on the characterization, we learn models to predict various aspects of cross-device search, including the next device used for search. This enables many applications. For example, accurately forecasting the device used for the next query lets search engines proactively retrieve device-appropriate content (e.g., short documents for smartphones), while knowledge of the current device combined with device-specific topical interest models may assist in better query-sense disambiguation. %to help the searcher once they transition to the target device.