Category Archives: Yahoo! Search Mobile

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).

More Details on Yahoo!’s Deal With Novarra

I recently had the pleasure to speak with Simon Hunt, Novarra‘s CTO. The goal of my phone call was to know more about the the deal they signed with Yahoo!. Novarra will automatically repurpose websites that are part of Yahoo’s OneSearch results.

I was quite worried when I heard about the partnership, since I didn’t want to experience the same issues than with the Vodafone UK case (which is now partly solved). I then contacted Novarra to get more details. Simon Hunt immediately got back to me and replied to the questions I had.

– Yahoo OneSearch provides two kind of results: traditional web results, and mobile web results. The good news for mobile commerce sites is that Novarra won’t transcode sites from the mobile web results.

– Only sites from “web results” will be transcoded. However, not all web sites have to be transcoded. If your site is properly coded, it doesn’t have to be transcoded to render properly on a handheld device.

Novarra stated that they have created a W3C Content Transformation task force, whose goal will be to work closely with the W3C in order to improve their service, and find signals on web sites that indicate that they do not need to be transcoded.

The team will operate publicly so that people that are active in the mobile web community can provide input.

I’m really glad to hear about the efforts made from Novarra, and wish them good luck in their endeavors.

Yahoo! Needs More Mobile Sites: Now Accepting Mobile Feeds

In its attempt to increase the size of its mobile web index, Yahoo! just announced that it’s now possible to submit more information about your mobile sites.

With Yahoo! Webmaster Central, errr, I mean Yahoo! Site Explorer, webmasters will now be able to submit the url of their website and wait for their mobile robot to crawl the site, or they can submit an entire site feed in one of the following formats:

You can provide us a feed in the following supported formats. We do recognize files with a .gz extension as compressed files and will decompress them before parsing.

So far, it was possible to submit a sitemap of your mobile site only with Google Webmaster Central, good move from Yahoo!.

Yahoo! Is Really Getting Serious About Mobile Search

Last week, Yahoo! proudly announced that their mobile search service (downloadable application) called OneSearch was now available on more than 85% of US phones.

In the meantime, they also wanted to show everyone how good OneSearch was, by comparing it with Google. A report called “Dare to Compare” is linked from their homepage and is available there .

After showing off its new mobile search engine, Yahoo! now announces the launch of its Mobile Publish Services, “a suite of services designed to enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content on mobile phones”. These services will be available on this website (nothing there yet).

This is good news for advertisers wanting to reach more customers through mobile devices.

Here are the new services that publishers will have access to in the 2nd quarter of 2007 and in 19 countries:

Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network

The Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network will allow mobile publishers to have syndicated advertising served on their mobile content and services. Publishers will be able to select the ad formats they want to have run, such as display, sponsored links, video or in-game placements.

Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine

The Yahoo! Mobile Content Engine will enable publishers to bring their content to Yahoo!’s mobile audience. It will also help enable publishers who do not have a mobile site or only have a limited mobile offering to quickly distribute their content to consumers on their mobile phones.

Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory

The Yahoo! Mobile Media Directory will allow publishers to make their mobile media content accessible directly through Yahoo! oneSearch. Publishers could submit a catalog of their content such as ringtones, games, video and applications.

Let’s break these walled gardens! Yahoo will now allow users to search for mobile content outside of their operator’s Wap portal.

Yahoo! Mobile Site Submit

The Yahoo! Mobile Site Submit will allow publishers to provide information about their mobile site, such as a description and relevant tags, to ensure that their sites are accurately indexed and available to consumers through Yahoo! oneSearch. For example, a hotel could submit their mobile site, including description and tag, enabling weekend travelers to find their location and see if they still have rooms available through Yahoo! oneSearch.

I don’t know what they mean with “tags”. Maybe they will allow people to submit XML feeds of their content, with something similar to Google Base.

With all these new services, Yahoo! is really showing everyone that they’re serious about mobile search. Google might be very quiet at the moment, but you can expect them to get more aggressive as well in the next few months.

Hey Yahoo and Live: My Site Already Links to Its Mobile Version, So Please Don’t Transcode It!

When you are using a traditional search engine on your mobile, it will transcode the pages automatically so that it can be displayed properly on your browser. This is done by using proxies. Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search are all providing this functionality. For example, if you use Google on your mobile, and choose to see “Web Results”, the page you’ll be viewing will look like this.

If you do have a mobile friendly version of your site, you can tell Google and others search engines not to transcode your page and to direct users to your mobile site instead.

This can be achieved by simply adding this link element in the head of your pages:

<link rel=“alternate” media=“handheld” href=“http://www.yourmobilesite.com/” />

Now, while Google does follow this link and skip the transcoding, I’ve noticed that Yahoo! and Live are behaving differently. For example, if you use Live Search on your mobile, all the results will be showed from a proxy server ( notice that urls start with http://mobrender.com/proxy.aspx?s.) whether you’ve specified a link to the mobile version of your site or not.

What annoys me is that some sites that I manage do have the link element to their mobile versions, but both Live Search and Yahoo aren’t supporting that. Instead, they will force the transcoding. I’ve tested that with many handsets, either XHTML or WML capable, but it was always the same. I’ve notified Yahoo! about this problem but they haven’t got back to me yet. I will also let Microsoft know about that. If you know of other ways to tell them not to use transcoding proxies, please let me know.

UPDATE: (03/06/07) I’ve received a response from someone at Yahoo! who told me that they are investigating this issue.