Characteristics of Mobile Web Content

The World Wide Web is no longer tethered to the desktops and laptops. The Web has gone mobile, providing instant access to information anywhere and anytime. The mobile Web can be considered a shadow of the World Wide Web, implemented using specialized markup languages and design techniques adapted for comparatively limited mobile phones and PDAs. Despite the growing importance and usage of the mobile Web, surprising little is known about it. This paper presents the results of a study of mobile Web content conducted in May and June of 2006. The paper examines the content of over one-million mobile Web pages from around the world using a search-assisted crawling methodology to locate and study pages for three of the most popular mobile Web formats WML 1.0, WML 2.0/XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTMLMP) and Compact HTML (C-HTML).