Mobile information search for location-based information

This study investigated mobile searching for location-based information by carrying out two experiments in an airport. The independent variables were user context, information type, information requirement pressure, and location-based information type. Experiment 1 compared users’ search performance in different user contexts while searching for different types of information. The results indicated that when users searched for location-based information, the average number of clicks decreased, the importance of the first search result increased, and free recall was better compared with non-location-based information searching. Experiment 2 further investigated the users’ mobile search performance under different levels of information requirement pressure. The results indicated that users under low pressure clicked more search results compared with users under high information requirement pressure. Compared to transactional query searching, when users engaged in informational and navigational queries, the average number of clicks increased, the importance of the first search result decreased, and free recall was worse. There was no significant difference in the number of clicks when users chose the first two search results during a mobile searching process for location-based information.