Mobile Search: Beyond 10 Blue Links
Fascinating presentation at SMX Local Mobile.
Mobile searchers don’t want lists of web pages – they want answers or fast ways to take action. Mobile search providers are increasingly experimenting with alternative interfaces, such as location-aware browsing, voice recognition, text messaging and other innovative approaches. Learn about these new efforts and how they potentially impact mobile search marketing efforts.
(room sparse, but excellent presentation!)
Mark McCormack, Chief Marketing Officer, CallGenie
Was around a long time before Goog411
Advertisement is in placements of results.
People communicate the same way they do voice search.
- Very conversational.
- Not a map problem, it’s a place problem.
- People don’t understand geography very well.
- Different places, same name
- Local landmarks are relevant
Lee Ott, Director, oneSearch, Yahoo!3 times as many mobiles as pcs by 2010
real possibility mobile ads will be bigger than pc advertising
- internet cos have failed cos by creating mobile apps that are a little more than extensions of pc experiences
- mobile demands new experiences that fit devices
- Y!’s goal is mobile first.
Users want instant gratification.
- Give me answers, images, entertainment
- results that matter
- results that work on my phone
- no more click and wait
- relevant to where I am and what i’m doing
- consumers don’t want to enter many words in search
- for “pizza” – local makes most sense, so they go to the top on mobile.
- Anywhere answers exist, they are presented front-and-center
- Location is a crippled form of context.
- Sports searches, scores came first, schedule, etc.
- Guesses intent based on intelligence
Industry Accelerators – will help mobile internet take off
- Since searches are extremely relevant, so are relevant advertising opportunities.
- Mobile search is hard to find. – 66% have “never heard of mobile search.”
- challenges: 89% of non-users don’t know how to access search on phone.
- solutions: Idle screen search box / search button / embed search in carrier portal.
- consumer challenge: complicated and variable data charges. 65% think there’s a charge associated with search. 80-90% of subscribers are on a pre-paid plan. there’s a FEAR of doing too much for their plans – spending too much money.
- solution: move towards simplified plans like unlimited plans.
- publisher challenge: it’s hard to develop for mobile – so many proprietary interfaces. format support. wml,xhtml,html
- solution: move towards standard technologies and format / fewer standardized browsers / better scripting support.
- SearchAssist for mobile is not possible because it requires scripting/ajax. browser on mobile is not robust yet.
- monotization challenge: It’s brand new. Lack of standards. Limited ad experience in mobile. few mobile sites.
- solution: educate and enable advertisers – standardize formats, single full suite for advertisers.
- 2007 is the tipping point for mobile – we are moving out of early adopters this year. Next year will be early mass market. like iphone which demonstrates data services as a core of mobile experiences changes landscape.
- Nobody has cracked the “local” problem yet.
Dan Gilmartin, VP Marketing, uLocate
A more visual approach. GPS enabled.
- where.com is a gps enabled application using extensive library of widgets
- Simplifies development (slides moving fast, dense slides) using a scripting language for creating mobile enabled apps. PHP / Ruby.
- Location extracted from network and given to the widget.
- You launch the “irish pub widget” ..or “find a local event”
- …you launch eventful widget device has already located you, using their widget to show info to you.
- Users personalize their phones at where.com — cool. Sort of like iGoogle.
Sumit Agarwal, Product Manager, Google, Inc.
Greg Sterling: here to announce the Google Phone (laughter)
Data – skate to where the puck will be.
Blended mobile product usage graph – iphone launch – highly disruptive
…Only Rate limited by devices to market…
…If you focus on getting subset of experiences right, you can do really well even with one device takes market share
Phone demos. iGoogle widget that syncs your on-phone screen
Goog411 is going to get more advanced soon.
….You can also say …”map it” — sends SMS map to your phone, will fire up google maps for mobile.
Why did Google pump Adwords advertisers in with opt-out options for mobile?If it’s not useful to you, we make it go away.
Greg complained about a “very generic answer.”
Fluid homescreens – search by walking around? (my question..yay!)
Privacy Issues, searching by walking around has lots of challenges, must have an affirmative user initiation. but widgets can possibly be developed for this based on user preferences. Like an RSS feed sort of thing. Ability to configure on your pc what appears on your phone is a big deal that also plays into the decisions of what shows up on your phone.
Huge emerging markets will never use the PC, but will use mobile. Global International market.
Google: In japan: 27-32% total regular web access comes from mobile devices. Wow!
What about ultramobile pcs? Will mobile search still be “mobile” search?
Yahoo: it will be much easier for consumers, but it’s still different. try 1search or yahoo search. Possibly they converge some, but what you are trying to do on pc vs. phone are different.
