Search engine for phonebook-based smart phone networks

Search engines generally lack the trust and personalization dimension. The outcomes of the search are not socially relevant: they often reflect only the content popularity based on lookup tables gathered by search robots. In order to obtain personalization and social relevance, in other words, to bring the search outcome closer to a common human perception of value and reliability, the search database itself could be personalized. One possible method to obtain personalization is through the social neighborhood of the searcher. An enabler for the personalization is the phonebook stored in mobile phones. The group of mobile phonebooks can create an infrastructure for a peer-to-peer search network with a social dimension. In order to demonstrate this concept our work introduces a novel search and recommender engine and application for phonebook-based smart phone networks. The concept has been implemented on the Symbian Series 60 platform over GSM using short message exchange. The efficiency of the search and recommendation system is also analyzed.