Date:22/11/2007 URL:
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/seta/2007/11/22/stories/2007112250081300.htm
Sci Tech
IT TRENDS
Search services go mobile
The mobile is the next frontier for Internet based search tools
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
To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe.
To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please
visit the list home page at
http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
