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Sci Tech
IT TRENDS
Search services go mobile
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The mobile is the next frontier for Internet based search tools
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The Biblical exhortation: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find,” assumes a special piquancy when one seeks information using one of the many Internet search engines. Successful search is a minor art in itself: seeking does not always end with successful finding. The sharpness of one’s search terms often dictates the relevance of what the search tool returns.
One can tolerate some wasted effort, and reconcile to trawling among the results to find what one really wants, in a desktop-based search. There is disk space and memory to spare.
But when Web-based search is transplanted to the smaller arena of a mobile phone or a hand held ‘connected’ device, users are less tolerant: they are usually charged prime rates for the access to the Internet — by the second, or by the kilobyte of download — and do not want to pay good money for rubbish. They know what they want and expect to receive it swiftly, economically.
Second-guessing the mobile information seeker’s intentions and coming up with the fastest, most accurate algorithm to do this has therefore become a challenge for the search engine industry.
Different medium
It is also big business. As many of the Net’s search leaders have found out, creating a mobile version of search tools originally designed for the desktop is not just a matter of saying: “Honey, I’ve shrunk the search engine!” It is an entirely different medium.
One of the first and more agile among Internet search leaders making this difficult transition has been Yahoo and in early 2007, it unveiled one Search, a mobile sibling of its desktop offering that tried to understand the difference between what a mobile and a tethered searcher sought, even when they entered the same search term.
“Mobile users don’t want to do research. They are looking for one piece of information,” Ojas Rege, Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, California (U.S.)-based Vice President for Global Mobile Products, told me.
Knowledge bank
Yahoo, which is estimated by independent agencies to account for about one third of all searches done on the Internet, realised, that no matter how wide the net it threw, to trawl the information available and how diligent the ‘crawlers’ it sent to dig them out, there was simply no way it could accumulate the sum of all knowledge that searchers would seek. So it did a clever thing: it made its users, part of its knowledge bank. The solution lay in another of the company’s offerings: Yahoo Answers.
Own resources
Customers of its email service (the largest such service in India) as well as other registered users could post a question on any topic and Yahoo featured multiple answers provided by other users. These were often so local in content (“Is there a crèche close to my house in Adyar, Chennai”) that no global search engine could hope to provide the answer from its owned cached resources. Yet somewhere out there on the worldwide web, there were good samaritans ready to take the time to provide an answer based on their own local knowledge.
By seamlessly integrating its Yahoo Answers offering with its made-for-mobile search tool as well as throwing in other tools like the web encyclopedia, Wikipedia and its own picture resource, Flickr, the company had a robust search tool for the emerging mobile market by mid 2007.
By last week it had tied up with 20 cellular providers around the world, including four in India — Aircel. BPL, BSNL and Idea. Customers of other mobile providers could also use the tool — they could type m.yahoo.com/start on their phones (or get the mobile search tool pushed to them from the web page http://mobile.yahoo.com/). Airtel users in India have had access to Google search from the Airtel Live mobile Internet portal.
The presence of a player like Yahoo at the Macau event was proof enough that the mobile opportunity was something no Net entity could afford to ignore.
One of the interesting dimensions of mobile search was a hand phone supplied to its customers by Japan’s largest Internet company, Softbank: It came with a dedicated button that provided one-click access to Yahoo one Search.
Almost simultaneously in the U.S., AT&T offered a Samsung handset with quick access to Napster Mobile, a search service that trawled a catalogue of over 5 million songs on sale.
Much of what mobile users want is tied to very local needs — and this is good news for a number of enterprising albeit smaller players with local domain knowledge. Telibrahma has created a search engine, Genie, for mobile phone users in Bangalore who may want to search for eating places, cinema halls, petrol bunks, ATMs, hospitals and the like. It is a small 147 KB download from its website ( http://www.telibrahma.com/demo/genie.jar ).
Girl next door
Telibrahma was one a dozen companies whose product was shortlisted for the GSM Association’s annual innovation awards. Another Bangalore search engine — www.asklaila.com — from Four Interactive, was co-founded by Shriram Adukoorie, a Microsoft veteran who helped launch MSN in India. It plans to extend its service which it likens to asking the ‘girl next door’, to mobile phones very soon.
One mobile search tool honoured recently — in Red Herring’s Asia Awards for 2007 — is the Chennai-based Onyomo’s www.owap.in currently localised for 10 Indian cities.
Service availability
The service is also available for those whose phones do not have Internet capability: They can send an SMS message. Indeed this is a feature that distinguishes the India offerings of even international mobile search tools like Yahoo.
The Mumbai-based Just Dial Services www.justdial.com has a local search engine across 42 cities that can be accessed by phone, mobile Internet or SMS.
There is no end to the innovation that the mobile search business has triggered: The Indian-owned, US-based V-Enable has launched what it calls the world’s first speech-driven mobile search tool: You can speak your query — a delayed flight’s timing, say — and receive the answer by SMS.
It is as yet very much a US-based service but is voice the way to go for mobile search? Who knows? But one thing is clear. Whether it is simple text or web page or voice is a matter of detail.
The larger message “blowin’ in the wind” is that the world’s 3 billion mobile phone users — 210 million of them in India — expect to search and find with ease and accuracy the information they need while on the move. Meeting this expectation is likely to be the biggest challenge, as well as the most exciting opportunity in the coming months, for enterprises rooted in the Internet.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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