dotMobi Takes The Wraps Off Made-For-Mobile White-Label Search Engine; Will Operators Jump On The Bandwagon? » mobilegroove

Search was the hot topic at Mobile Monday in Düsseldorf this week. I was privileged to speak there and give attendees a peek into some of my early findings. (Regular readers will know I am immersed in writing reports, white papers and magazine articles on all things related to mobile search and content discovery – it’s in my DNA. I also make it a practice to post all my work on this site for you to browse freely – so please check back regularly.)

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to blog about the event for MoMo (thanks again to Christian Breitschwerdt and Mark Waechter ) and will post my observations on the official site. In the meantime, here’s my take on one of the evening’s surprises: a detailed demo of dotMobi’s mobile search service. (dotMobi is the company behind the .mobi Internet domain.) Ronan Cremin, dotMobi’s Director of Development Initiatives, told me the launch has purposely been a quiet one, but this post will hopefully change that(!) Check it out at http://find.mobi. It’s slated to go live in 4Q 2007.

Fortunately, we got a preview in a no-holds-barred comparison of made-for-mobile search versus the likes of Google on mobile. Ronan’s presentation that drove home the point that poor usability is baked into any Internet search engine that has merely been retrofitted for the mobile Web. (I need little convincing. This observation has been at the core of my own presentation for the last three years, but you could hear a light bulb go “click” as the other attendees thought this through…)

In a nutshell, dotMobi’s search engine crawls sources including Wikipedia and the mobile-optimized sites in its index. (This is set to hit 700,000 sites as we speak.) How much input from the wider Web? “Less than 1 percent is mobile-friendly sites from the Internet.” It’s a bit unsettling that the percentage is so small, but that’s because publishers have yet to move full-steam ahead on their mobile sites.

A main attraction on dotMobi’s search engine is local language content and context. It’s not rocket science. It simply factors in physical location (country for now) to deliver users more relevant results. As Ronan put it: “This doesn’t mean just the language of the interface; it means giving you content that we think is local.” (A search for Iraq in Italy, for example, brought up Italian-language news sources. Of course, local search in the U.S. will bring up American sources, but dotMobi can’t yet deep-dive to deliver results relevant to the city or county. – that’s work in progress.)

Results are ranked according to what Ronan calls “standard page rank-like algorithms,” in addition to dotMobi’s own mobile fitness test of sites (See: http://ready.mobi). Users with Webkit (Nokia S60 & iPhone) browsers will get richer results, including helpful site thumbnails that show you whether a site is worth clicking in the first place. The amount of text (“verbosity”) also scales according to screen size. Breaks between categories and a ticker down the side of the results is set to help users navigate around the page rather than only scroll and troll results.

Ronan tells me dotMobi is in discussions with mobile operators who see it as a new kind of vertical mobile search engine that would cover the made-for-mobile Web and co-exist with any other mobile search engines they support. If this happens, then mobile metasearch – the ability to combine search results from various sources to deliver a mix in line with mobile operator business rules – can’t be far away.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:58 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.