Using link analysis to improve layout on mobile devices

Abstract

Delivering web pages to mobile phones or personal digital assistants has become possible with the latest wireless technology. However, mobile devices have very small screen sizes and memory capacities. Converting web pages for delivery to a mobile device is an exciting new problem. In this paper, we propose to use a ranking algorithm similar to Google's PageRank algorithm to rank the content objects within a web page. This allows the extraction of only important parts of web pages for delivery to mobile devices. Experiments show that the new method is effective. In experiments on pages from randomly selected websites, the system needed to extract and deliver only 39% of the objects in a web page in order to provide 85% of a viewer's desired viewing content. This provides significant savings in the wireless traffic and downloading time while providing a satisfactory reading experience on the mobile device.