Web Site Personalizers for Mobile Devices

The fastest growing community of web users is that of mobile visitors who browse with wireless PDAs, cell phones, and pagers. Unfortunately, most web sites today are optimized exclusively for desktop, broadband clients, and deliver content poorly suited for mobile devices — devices that can display only a few lines of text using slow wireless networks. To best serve the needs of this growing community, we propose building web site personalizers that observe the behavior of web visitors and automatically customize and adapt sites for each individual mobile visitor. In this paper, we give an overview of our approach to web site personalization as utilitymaximizing search through the space of personalized web sites. Following this framework we have implemented two personalizers: PROTEUS and MINPATH. PROTEUS allows changes to site navigation (adding or removing links) as well as content manipulation (rearranging or eliding content), and evaluates the result with a learned model of the current visitor. MINPATH concentrates exclusively on adding “shortcut” links, but uses a model learned by clustering visitors based on their sequences of page requests. We introduce PROTEUS and MINPATH, and outline our current and future directions for these personalizers.