Mobile Groove

In brief: An analysis on mobile search strengths and shortcomings based on some eye-opening usage stats presented at the recent Mobile Search Masterclass; a summary of key findings from MSG’s own mobile voice search white paper (examining how Google stacks up against ChaCha and Vlingo using Yahoo as the default search engine); and the business case for a new breed of mobile search tools (ranging from social search to SMS search to content verticals) PLUS news you may have missed from Alabot, an Indian company specialized in natural language and artificial intelligent applications which enable interactive, multi-lingual mobile search.

No matter how you look at it (and who you ask) mobile search, the model that has effectively retrofitted Internet search for mobile devices, is riddled with shortcomings This was the message that came across in the interviews I conducted for Mobile Advertising Research UK, the presentations I and other search authorities made during the recent Mobile Search Masterclass in London, and, more recently, in the mobile search assessment white paper (Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone) I co-authored with Peggy Albright. (DOWNLOAD)

Is mobile search broken? More importantly, how can we fix it? These are the questions I put to a variety of executives representing companies from across the mobile search and advertising business ecosystem. Read between the lines, and their answers – along with my own conclusions – point to areas of improvement and opportunity in mobile search.

MOBILE ADVERTISING RESEARCH UK

Primary research and C-Level interviews with agencies, brands, operators and third-parties reveal mobile search is missing the mark. Their gripe: the poor quality of mobile search (specifically universal search powered by keyword queries and PageRank algorithms) is to blame for a lack of interest and investment in paid search advertising.

As a leading executive at a global brand put it: “Just between the two of us, our spend for search is by far not in the digits yet – and it won’t be….We do a lot in mobile, but the basics of search are not yet at the level of sophistication consumers would expect from us.”

At the other end of the spectrum, agencies are far from upbeat about the short-term outlook for mobile search. As one managing director at a mobile marketing agency put it: “Just the way the content is indexed prevents advertisers from creating a cohesive plan to integrate search in their [mobile] advertising strategies. There is just not the volume to get in and really do some targeted search [advertising], and that’s what brands want: to make advertising personal and relevant to every search the consumer makes.”

TAPTU MOBILE SEARCH GENERATING 1 MILLION MOBILE SEARCHES a day. The exclusively mobile search engine has revealed new statistics in preparation for the launch of its iPhone application. With 3.4 million unique users in April, generating a million searches a day, Taptu offers users results from sites that have been optimized for the mobile Web. The company’s blog reminds us that when Taptu started out, it counted some 10,000 searches on a mobile device. In a press statement, Steve Ives, Founder and CEO of Taptu, reads this development as a clear indication that “there is a distinct need for a mobile-only search engine with results best viewed on mobile devices.” Source

The bottom line: It’s encouraging to see traction for this particular approach to mobile search. Peggy adds: The question remains: Will mobile-only search, which essentially promotes a subset of wealth of content/apps/stuff out there, continue to flourish? Or will it be Web search scenarios, enabled by the usual list of suspects all over again. I have some positive views on the potential of social search in mobile, and share these via podcasts (such as this one) and my contributions to mobile search white papers.

And while we mull over the prospects for mobile search, I invite you to consider the graph below from StatCounter Global Stats (based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites) showing the companies that lead in online search . Charles Knight – my esteemed colleague and the “voice of alternative search” at MSG partner site AltSearchEngines - has launched a contest and asks: What is the one word that best describes Google’s lead? (Google is the read line at the top.) “Alarming” is my pick…

Since AltSearchEngines doesn’t focus on mobile search (which is why we have partnered), allow me to share the StatCounter Global Stat chart for mobile search, and likewise ask your views. Why does Google lead the pack? (Particularly when the mobile experience offered by Google is known to be unsatisfactory…) What do YOU think?

Yahoo finally and officially joins the group of search companies getting on the voice search bandwagon, and announces that it has launched voice-enabled oneSearch for the Yahoo! Mobile iPhone app.

While Yahoo comes to the party more or less six months later than rivals such as Google, there is some indication that the wait was worth it if we consider that this service extends beyond allowing people to conduct keyword searches (for flight numbers, locations, Web site names, local restaurants – the works). People using the app can also use voice to customize the ‘My Interests’ tab. The procedure (according to the press release): “Simply click on ‘add anything’, speak the topic you’re interested in, then select the relevant content and add it to your page.” The Yahoo! oneSearch with voice application is currently available on more than 80 different devices and across platforms including Blackberry, Nokia, Windows Mobile, and now the iPhone – with support in eight languages.

Various bloggers have tried out the voice app, which harnesses speech recognition technology from Vlingo, and reported mixed results. But it’s difficult to judge the user experience based on random road tests. (This is why MSG has pooled its resources to produce mobile search research that, like my own mobile advertising white papers, offers readers a balanced assessment based on first-hand experience and solid methodology.)

The Yahoo app, however, comes in too late to be included in Pump Up The Volume, MSG’s own assessment of Web search on the iPhone. But that won’t keep us from conducting our own road test of the Yahoo app soon. Regular readers and Twitter followers (@peggyanne) may recall I announced the project a while back (a teaser before we had further refined our methodology to account for fundamental differences between natural language and keyword search, an important improvement that makes the results all the more compelling).

The white paper, researched and written in collaboration with Peggy Albright, MSG Associate and founder of Albright Communications, will be released next week. By way of background, our work assesses the overall performance of the voice-enabled search services offered by ChaCha, Google, and Vlingo in a typical range of use cases and scenarios. (Vlingo for iPhone converts queries into text and submits them to one of two search engines, Google and Yahoo. We chose Yahoo.)

A special highlight: A foreword by Bill Meisel, Editor of the specialist publication and voice technology knowledge destination Speech Strategy News. I’m honored to have him on board for the voice search white paper, and look forward to showcasing his analysis/columns on MSG soon.

I won’t divulge all the white paper results and stats here. However, I can say that ChaCha’s results proved superior to both the Google Mobile App’s voice feature and Vlingo for iPhone.

What do you get when you bring together the intellectual resources of Rudy De Waele/ mTrends and dotopen, an open innovation consulting firm known for its insights into the emerging mobile Web 2.0 ecosystem, and MSearchGroove, a knowledge resource dedicated to the analysis of mobile search (and all things mobile at the intersection of context and content)? In a word, impact!

Since teaming up with Rudy De Waele, blogger at mTrends and dotopen founder, to develop mobile search case studies in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission), and seeing the positive response to our work to date, I’m convinced mobile search is back again at the top of the industry agenda. And with good reason: Search is the de facto interface to all things digital in the online space, and there is every indication that it will be the same in mobile.

From mobile advertising, where our queries trigger the delivery of related advertising (in the best case scenario, we’re not there yet), to social media, where the content we appreciate and discuss across destinations ranging from MySpace to Twitter allows us to restore balance in an otherwise purely algorithmic approach that tends to promote search engine optimized websites over what we find genuinely relevant and useful, mobile search is where the action is.

But as Rudy and I have both pointed out in our recent presentations, mobile search is not about the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). Rudy spoke at Next09, and you can find his slides further on in this post; I spoke at the European Mobile Media Conference, and my deck can likewise be found after the jump.

Indeed, context and personalization change all the rules (!)

A highlight of our recent presentations: A comprehensive overview of the market and (thanks to Rudy) a SWOT analysis of the players that stand out in their category such as Google (universal search with a poor mobile offer and an even weaker grasp of social search), and Twitter (a case of mobile search + social media = real-time results that really reflect what we discuss/share).

In my own mobile search research – an on-going project that began back in 2004/2005 when I wrote the first report on mobile search and content discovery, a 220+ page report published by Informa Telecoms & Media – I have recently identified some 60+ companies and 10+ categories of mobile search I would like to share with you (below) for your feedback.

Judging from the high level of interest in social search-related companies and concepts – such as Taptu, abphone, and people-powered answers search from ChaCha – expressed by participants at conferences where I have spoken, I am confident social search is more than just another hot topic.

In fact, this new breed of services, which combines mobile social networking fun and community with the utility of mobile search, potentially creates new forms of interaction and new opportunities for the delivery of relevant mobile advertising. Granted we aren’t there yet, but there are some signposts that I believe mark the way. One start-up that that stands out is HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com).

The company, based in University College Dublin, Ireland, was founded by Dr. Maurice Coyle and Dr. Peter Briggs, and is a spin-out from the research group of Prof. Barry Smyth, who is perhaps best known as co-founder and Chief Scientist of ChangingWorlds (now a Unit of Amdocs Interactive), a company that has pioneered personalization technology. I recently caught up with Barry for a guided tour of the service and an update on the company’s mobile ambitions.

I am also proud that Barry recently partnered with me to publish a series of thought leadership columns exclusively on MSG. Understandably, Barry took a break from the series (which kicked off with this exploration of the “hidden interaction costs” associated with surfing and exploring the mobile Internet) to develop his path-breaking HeyStaks service – now in Beta. But he’ll be back soon with a typically cool column focused on the intelligent delivery of personalized content and advertising, so watch this space!

What is the problem?

As the company cleverly points out in the cartoon strip below, we waste a lot of time searching for things our peers are also searching for (or may already have found!). To make matters worse, we have a lot of trouble sharing what we find with people once we find it. A solution is to make search a social activity (and that goes double for mobile search, in my view) and provide people the tools to create and communicate the searches that matter to them most.

In-Brief: Consider this (the last in this week’s trilogy of iPhone posts) a place-setter for the news we’re likely to see later this month from Taptu, a provider of socially-assisted search I have had high on my radar since it broke on the scene just over three years ago. Look for a new service focused squarely on enabling mobile search across touch devices, and a short private beta before it launches in the Apple App Store next month.

Taptu’s approach, which takes universal search to the next level, crawling and indexing the social networking sites and destinations such as MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia, to expose an eclectic mix of results and content we might not have found otherwise, has been at the core of Taptu’s differentiation. But it’s the company’s latest release white paper (Touch Search: A New Vision For Mobile Search, which you can download by clicking the button in the sidebar) that signals an exciting shift in the mobile search paradigm.

The advance of touch devices changes how we browse the mobile Web and, naturally, it impacts what we expect from mobile search. What’s more, the touch Web represents the fast-growing subset of the Web, consisting of websites and Web pages that are optimized for access by touch devices like the iPhone.

However, as I point out in this earlier post, Taptu does more than acknowledge this trend; it has responded with a roadmap to encourage the innovation that content providers and brands agencies will require to deliver an optimized search and advertising experience for touch devices. I met up with Andreas Bernstrom, Taptu COO, a few weeks back to see Taptu’s prototype search service in action. Now I have the green light to post (I respect Andreas’ request not to give too much away here), so here’s a brief summary of my private demo and the details I can share.