CIL 2009 Wednesday, "Mobile Search"

by Megan Fox
web.simmons.edu/~fox/mobile

Types of search tools, major players, harnessing the mobile advantage, text/SMS search

• Mobile search devices will account for more searches per day than desktop (Google CEO) 10 619M searches per day by 2012. Iphone accounts for 50x the traffic than any other
• Searchers want a fact or action, not results, when they search
• 50% of searches are one word

What are they looking for?

• local search: movie search, restaurant
  
• information search: definitions, jeopardy-type answers
• rich content

Traditional search engines with mobile interfaces - you can search these with a desktop to get the experience even if you don't have a data plan. This will become the primary way people access the internet

• m.live.om
• www.google.com/m
• m.yahoo.com

Mobile search engines aggregate information from other databases and present it in a categorized results list. So, Washington DC reveals weather, local news, events, web sites, mobile web sites, more results (photos, images, stock quotes, traffic, wikipedia, Yahoo Answers)

A search on Villanova produces sports scores first.

Mobile search Applications (Yahoo oneSEARCH)

• pull content from web site into the 'results list'
• put search box on 'desktop' of mobile device
• can create icon for searches
• will use your history to help future searches

Yahoo is going after phone/service providers

Google trying to rely on pullthru - hope people will love Google and take it from their local PC to their mobile. They mark mobile results using little phone icons.

• They offer 'tabbed results' so you can skip to Web, Local, Images, Mobile as opposed to Yahoo's categorized-in-list

Use barcodes, photos, to launch search... Thrrum Cameraphone search
GotVoice - start search with voice command
Tellme -- a microsoft subsidiary
1800-CALL-411
GOOG411
Spoken/voice search - both Google and Yahoo! for Yahoo, Android, Blackberry
Shazam audio search - "name that tune!"
Vlingo - why tap when you can talk? - provides voice recog for applications

Google Book Search mobile app

• in full version they scan the page and return pdf
• in mobile, they use OCR
  

Clusty - discovery / browse search. Hm... this might help both mobile and desktop for disambiguation

Social search - allowing a human to answer another human, or uses link analysis
- hiogi

Abphone social mobile - rather than use PageRank, returns what people are looking at.

Boopsie - "Mobilize your library" - WorldCat app

Proximic - copy in a paragraph and get results; re-enter paragraph. In mobile environment

Visual Results - searchme, cooliris

SMS / Texting - Google 466453 (best)
Yahoo Text 92466 (fastest)
ChaCha - best for hard questions 242242