RuralCafe: web search in the rural developing world

The majority of people in rural developing regions do not have access to the World Wide Web. Traditional network connectivity technologies have proven to be prohibitively expensive in these areas. The emergence of new long-range wireless technologies provide hope for connecting these rural regions to the Internet. However, the network connectivity provided by these new solutions are by nature intermittent due to high network usage rates, frequent power-cuts and the use of delay tolerant links. Typical applications, especially interactive applications like web search, do not tolerate intermittent connectivity. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of RuralCafe, a system intended to support efficient web search over intermittent networks. RuralCafe enables users to perform web search asynchronously and find what they are looking for in one round of intermittency as opposed to multiple rounds of search/downloads. RuralCafe does this by providing an expanded search query...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Jay Chen, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Jinyang Li
• Keywords: Efficient Web Search, Intermittent Connectivity, Internet Technology, Search Query Interface, WWW 2009