Category Archives: SEO

Japanese Mobile Operator NTT DoCoMo To Partner With Google

Japan’s biggest mobile phone operator, NTT DoCoMo will partner with Google to provide a search service and other applications from Google on its i-mode portal, according to Nikkei Business Daily, and reported by AFP.

NTT DoCoMo is said to have chosen to partner with Google because its customers are demanding more Internet functions on their cell phones.

Google is still far behind Yahoo in Japan’s search engine market. With this partnership with NTT DoCoMo, which has more than 50 million customers, Google will be able to gain some market share in the mobile search segment.

When Will Mobile Advertising Really Take Off?

A study made by Gartner predicted that revenues made from mobile advertising will be worth $11 billion by 2011. But not everyone is that optimistic, even people from mobile advertising companies. Business Week reports what people from Nokia or Screentonic have said about such figures:

Kuhn, CEO of a mobile advertising company acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in May, views most analyst predictions as way too rosy.

Mike Baker, vice-president in change of Nokia’s (NOK) ad business, also sees a longer wait, suggesting it will take at least five years for the industry to surpass $10 billion in annual revenue. “The near-term visibility is cloudy,” he says.

I think 2007 was really the year when mobile advertising companies really started to push their services and big brands trying them. We just need to be patient to see where we’re headed, and maybe see the big tech brands such as Google or Microsoft adjusting their strategies.

AOL Mobile Search Now Has A Mobile Web Index

It appears that AOL has decided to build a Mobile Web index for its mobile search engine. It used to have only regular Web pages, and now allows you to find mobile friendly sites (coded in WML, XHTML, etc).

Just like Yahoo! OneSearch, results from the Mobile Web index are displayed right below traditional web results, see an example here (3 Mobile Web links against 6 for web results).

AOL is using Google to serve Web results, but they have built their own technology to index mobile sites. It’s good to see this move from AOL, they have decided to not just rely on transcoded web pages and allow users to easily find mobile friendly sites.

I find the relevance of mobile web results to be quite good, I’ve ran a few tests and quite frankly it does seem more relevant than Google Mobile…

I was unable to find information on the bot they use to crawl mobile sites, or if it was possible to submit your mobile site for inclusion on their index, so I’m hoping to find more details soon.
I hope Microsoft’s Live Search for mobile will do the same: Google, Yahoo, and AOL all have mobile web indices now, so Microsoft needs to play catch-up in this area.

Mobile Search Kinda Sucks – But Does Anyone Care?

Peggy Anne Salz wrote a post at MSearchGroove where she discusses about the findings of a mobile search study made my Informa.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the relevance of Mobile/WAP results returned by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! on UK mobile carriers’s portals.

The study reveals that Mobile and WAP sites were hard to find in these search engines’s results, and that their relevance was often very poor:

  • Google and Yahoo off-portal Fixed Internet results were spot-on in terms of relevance. (After all, Internet search is what they were designed to do and that legacy makes it patently difficult to switch gears and excel in mobile from day one. As one content aggregator put it: “Google and Yahoo: They talk mobile but think Web.”)
  • Off-portal WAP results were a no-show and poor at best. From the findings: “Results were consistently off-topic, often absurdly so.”

It’s true that operators and/or search engines often tend to want to display traditionnal search results first, rather than mobile search ones.

According to Peggy, Informa informed operators about these issues regarding mobile sites results and it seems like they were unaware of that or really don’t care.

The operators claimed to be unaware of the problems; even more shocking is their indifference.A Vodafone spokesman said: “We’re offering the Internet on your mobile, and from the web results you highlight, we are satisfied that users are getting the information they want.” Translated: delivering fixed Internet content via mobile is the priority; WAP isn’t.

Yep, Vodafone have been saying the same thing since since the launch of their new Vodafone live! portal in the UK: they want to allow their users to replicate on their mobile devices what they can do on a computer. Pretty easy to do, right? Nope, even if handsets are getting better, you still cannot have the same Web experience on your small screen than on your PC.

That’s why there’s still a growing need for mobile specific sites, allowing a better user experience. But operators somehow tend to ignore that, and want to force people to view transcoded sites rather than made for mobile ones.

Peggy concludes her post by saying that no one really talks about the core issue: the state of mobile web. Does it even exist? Should there be a desktop Web, and a mobile Web, with sites designed for handset devices? Or does the mobile Web just consist of transcoded websites?

I personnally that we should have both. If I want to check out the New York Times website while on the go, then a transcoded version is fine. However, if I want to book a hotel room from my mobile phone, I would strongly prefer to have a site designed for mobile devices.

It’s true that there is an obvious lack of real standards for the mobile web, so all actors in this industry: operators, the W3C, mobile developers, mobile startups etc must make an effort to create them and educate site owners. Otherwise, I really don’t see how to trully improve the web experience of people using mobile devices.

Taptu Launches New Kind Of Mobile Search Engine

Taptu , a new mobile search engine, was officially launched today. Taptu was built by a bunch of passionate people (and pretty laid back) who wanted to make it easier to search from a small device. Check out their About page or their blog to know more about the people behind this new kind of mobile search engine.

Taptu uses a technique called social-assisted search to provide “purer” results. Social-Assisted search consists of combining algorithmic search results with social accuracy and editorial review.

Taptu believes that because of the limitations of the mobile Web as opposed to desktop Web: limited screen space, data cost, small keypad, etc, mobile search engines need to rely on human input to only return the very best results.

The particularity of Taptu is that it includes reach media, such as videos and audio that you can play right from their search results, which I find really cool.

It’s more oriented towards mobile content search. It doesn’t have local search, news results, or mobile web results.

Taptu is available at this address http://taptu.mobi/ The interface is very simple: just one search box. Type in a query, press search, and Taptu will return categorized search results:

– Images
– Wiki
– Web pages
– Videos
– Songs
– Artists
– Lyrics

Example of a search for “daft punk”

Taptu
I look forward to seeing future developments of this new search engine, it sure is promising.

Microsoft’s Testimony Before Congress Regarding Google-Doubleclick Merger: WTF?

So Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith is about to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust regarding Google’s merger with Doubleclick.

I’m quite puzzled by one part of his testimony:

This country doesn’t permit a phone company to listen to what you say and use that information to target ads. The computer industry doesn’t permit a software company to record what you type and use that information to target ads. Yet with this merger, Google seeks to record almost everything you see and do on the Internet and use that information to target ads.

I really don’t get the sentence about recording personal information to influence ad targeting. Isn’t Microsoft doing the exact same thing with their AdCenter program? I mean, Adcenter’s specificity is that it uses demographic data to fine-tune targeting, such as sex, age, or income. If they’re not recording information about their users, where are they getting their demographic data from?

Sorry, Brad, but I don’t get it?