Category Archives: Mobile Search

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.

Ads On AOL Mobile Search Are Powered By JumpTap

According to Bena from GoMoNews, JumpTap serves advertisements on AOL Mobile Search. I ran some searches on AOL Mobile Search and sponsored listings appeared and they were indeed served by JumpTap.

For example, here’s a screenshot of the search results fot the query “games“, the ad at the top of the page: “Free Voice Msg” is powered by JumpTap.

What surprises me is that AOL bought Third Screen Media on May, a mobile advertising company capable of serving search ads. So why has AOL decided to choose JumpTap instead? I’m going to find out more about that and let you know when I get more details.

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.

Yahoo! To Officially Launch Mobile Digital Content Search

Back in march, Yahoo! announced the launch of its Mobile Publisher Services. As part of these services is the Mobile Media Directory, which is basically a way for mobile content providers to have their content indexed in Yahoo OneSearch and be searchable by mobile users.

The service is not live yet, however, I recently heard that it will be launched next month on the WAP portal of an important Asian carrier that signed a deal with Yahoo!. Basically, the service will allow Content Providers that are partners of this carrier to submit their mobile content (via a XML feed) so that users can find them via OneSearch on the carrier’s portal.

I cannot disclose the name of this carrier due to a NDA, but I believe it will be the first to provide Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory.

This is clearly a competing service to pure mobile content search players such as Medio, JumpTap, MotionBridge, or Fast.

Let’s also not forget Google, which is very likely to launch a mobile content search engine as well.

Yahoo! recently updated is Mobile Publisher Services page and there is now more details about the Mobile Media Directory :

Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory

The Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory enables you to bring your media content to Yahoo!’s large mobile user base. When you submit media to the directory, it will become available to the millions of mobile consumers searching for media content through Yahoo! oneSearch and other mobile search offerings powered by Yahoo!. For example, if you’re a publisher of ringtones and videos, your inventory will appear when someone searches for a particular song or recording artist. Click here to view examples.

Serving up your media products in such a highly–relevant manner increases the likelihood that consumers will actively trial them. And those who do will be able to submit ratings and reviews, so if your stuff is good, the world will know.

Adding your catalog to the Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory is straightforward. The directory accepts images, themes, multimedia files (music, video, etc), ringtones, games and other applications. You can associate names, detailed descriptions, tags, and other rich descriptors with your content – to ensure it will be served in as relevant a manner as possible.

What’s interesting is that users will be able to rate and review these mobile contents.

Here’s the user interface of Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory (source):

Users type in their search query into OneSearch’s searchbox. Here, the user is looking for games.

Search results page for “games”. Mobile Content results appear at the top of the page, and below are usual Web and Mobile pages.

And this is the Mobile Content page. What seems like an average rating (represented by stars)is displayed on top of the page, along with the mobile content’s name and a description. There’s a link “get it from publisher” that probably leads you to the mobile content provider’s purchase page.

Some screenshots are provided directly on the product page, which is really good for users. Then you have some reviews, which are also very useful as they serve as recommendations and allow people to discover new mobile content.

I was able to view a presentation of Yahoo Mobile Media Directory on the Asian carrier’s portal, and the user interface was the same than the one on the sreenshots above minus the ratings and reviews.

The service clearly looks impressive, and I can tell you that Yahoo! will now represent a major threat to white label mobile content search engines such as Medio Systems, Jumptap, or MotionBridge (owned by Microsoft).

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.

How Vodafone and Novarra Killed Mobile Commerce

After the chaos caused by Vodafone UK Live’s new Internet platforms and Services, Vodafone may be regretting choosing Novarra, the company behind their mobile optimising technology.

The new mobile Internet experience on Vodafone UK consists of a transcoding solution that automatically reformats websites so they can display properly on handheld devices.

While this technology is great for mobile users who want to access to virtually any website, as they would do from their desktop browser, it is totally ruining mobile content provider’s income, but also Vodafone’s own revenue sharing income. Basically, Vodafone shot itself in the foot.

In fact, anytime you want to access to a site from Vodafone Live’s portal, whether through Google, or through their embedded virtual browser, Novarra will download the requested site, reformats it, and display it in your browser. Novarra will do so even if the requested site is a mobile/WAP site, or a site perfectly suited to display content on mobile devices.

The problem is that when downloading the requested website, Novarra will mask the visitor’s User Agent, so mCommerce sites that rely on user agents to display their content will not have a correct transcoded page.

For example, if a Vodafone UK customer is using Google to search for ringtones, if he clicks on either the natural search or paid listing of a mobile ringtone Wap site, he will land on a transcoded page displaying a message saying “sorry, there’s no content for your phone”.

At this time, this technology is causing LOTS of mobile content providers in the UK to lose sales, and the mobile consumer experience is very disappointing.

It is possible to stop this transcoding thanks to Bango, a mCommerce platform, by registering your site to get it whitelisted. Due to the large number of whitelistings, only a few mobile sites have been whitelisted so far. But this is just a temporary workaround.

Novarra must make sure that mobile sites aren’t transcoded. Google itself is unhappy by the fact that Novarra is transcoding their mobile AdWords customers’s sites.

I’ve been informed by someone at Vodafone UK that they’re doing their best to quickly fix this major issue, let’s see what happens, hoping that this wrong strategy will serve as an example to other carriers.

I’ve also contacted Novarra directly but they didn’t get back to me yet.

MSearchGroove: New Site about Mobile Search and Mobile Content Discovery

MSEARCHGROOVE.com is the newest venture from Peggy Anne Salz, author of the industry’s first comprehensive (220+ pages) report on mobile search and content discovery. Living up to its strapline: “At the intersection of content and context”, Peggy’s site – formally launched in May – is fast becoming the industry’s premiere thinking space to discuss and debate mobile search, personalization, recommendation, targeted mobile advertising, and social networking.

The site also features primary research, analysis, interviews, and podcasts showcasing the companies and technologies just
coming out of stealth mode to have a profound impact on the industry.

Be sure to check out their great article about Google on Vodafone Live! Netherlands, the first Vodafone portal in Europe to unveil this search engine.

Microsoft Acquires Mobile Ad Company Screentonic

It’s better late than never, Microsoft has decided to purchase Screentonic, a french mobile advertising company.

It’s the second french company that Microsoft adds to its mobile division, the first one was MotionBridge, a mobile search company which has been acquired last year.

Microsoft now catches up with Google and Yahoo, which are already providing mobile advertising offers such as click-to-call or pay-per-click advertising.