Future of Mobile Search
Have you ever searched for tutorials on 3G from your mobile phone? Most likely, your answer would be no but if I had asked the same question for search on PC, chances are that many of the telecom professionals could have searched for it. Here lies the difference between search on PC and search on mobile. The search algorithms that worked for PC are unlikely to work for the mobile. On the mobile, most of the search queries are around navigation, direction and local search.
Search has been an integral part of internet. In fact, search is the very first functionality that any new user of internet uses. However, this is not true for mobile internet. The mobile search is yet not anywhere near the adoption levels of online PC based search.
How is Mobile Search different?
The fundamental difference between the mobile search and PC search is the access device. The screen size of the mobile phone is a constraint and hence the internet search results need to be modified. Even the input keyboard is different and the search string could be shorter which means the search result has to be intuitive.
The second difference is in the usage pattern of mobile. Unlike PC, the mobile phone is a ubiquitous device and people normally search for “at the moment” kind of thing. This means they search for nearest restaurant, retail points, service centers or mobile content. Their need is immediate and the patience or tolerance is low. They are looking for relevant results that are actionable like they need a taxi that can reach them fast and they should be able to book the taxi using their mobile phone. This means that the result needs to be location aware and should also give the phone number of the taxi company.
Thirdly, the consumer expectations changes with the time of day for the search results e.g. an afternoon search for restaurants means that the results should be about restaurants amenable to business meetings whereas, in the evening the same search should retrieve fun places like pubs or lively music restaurants.
Lastly, the difference is in the frequency of search and the number of attempts for each search. On PC, a surfer changes his search string multiple times before he gets the right results while on a mobile, nobody is likely to change the search string more than a couple of times. Also, people search at least 4-5 different things on PC everyday but a typical mobile internet user searches something only once in 4-5 days.
Why is mobile search languishing behind the PC search?
The number of search queries on mobile was not even 2% of that on PC in 2007 (m:metrics reported 27 million mobile searches per day in 2007) and the main reasons for this dismal performance were
- High cost of internet impacting the usage
- Low penetration of mobile internet, e.g. in Europe, the mobile internet penetration is barely into double digits
- Experience of mobile internet due to small screen size
- Unavailability of search engines relevant to the mobile phones
Future of Mobile Search
The mobile search should be able to utilize all the resources (location, camera, voice, etc.) that the device has to offer to retrieve socially relevant results that can give confidence to the user in almost every situation even if he is alone or in a completely unfamiliar environment. I am listing below five different types of mobile search which hold a lot of promise in future. I have also included a few videos for each search type to demonstrate how it works.
- Local Search: The biggest benefit a mobile phone is that it is location or context aware. Both GPS as well as non-GPS devices can provide location co-ordinates based on different technologies. The search needs to take the location co-ordinates into consideration while churning out the results. Thus search for a television should give me the retail points in the vicinity. I would expect the search to take into account my past queries as mobile device is a personal device and is unlikely to be used by multiple people. Local search or Yellow pages seems to hold the maximum potential for mobile search as well as for mobile advertising.
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