Search vs. Services
By Carlo Longino, Fri Jun 17 20:00:00 EEST 2005

Google has announced a new search product for mobile-tailored content. While mobile search is getting better, services from search engine providers could be more compelling.


Mobile search has long been a hot topic, with much of the talk focusing on how mobile users' needs differ from people searching the traditional Net. Mobile users want -- or need -- answers, not pages and pages of results that might lead to the information they're looking for. Search engines are catching on to this, offering things like Google SMS, or even natural-language search.

But just as search players on the wired Net started as directories or simple search engines but have evolved now to much, much more, there's room for a similar evolution in the mobile space -- offering services on top of search functionality. Something like Google SMS or Yahoo! Local is a first step, offering a better interface to search for mobile users. Google's taken another step this week, launching a mobile search site for XHTML sites designed for mobile devices. Sure, it makes things easier -- but do services more akin to Yahoo!'s broader mobile offerings hold more promise than search alone?

Yahoo! Mobile offers a lot of features available on its wired site, but most importantly integration into the My Yahoo! services users have, like e-mail, messenger, even RSS feeds. In many ways, it's the sort of integrated portal many carriers wish they had -- if somebody is an active Yahoo! user, taking advantage of its e-mail and messenger services and so on, access to those services is available from the mobile Web, too. For all of Google's moves to expand its offerings and even move to a personalized portal, its mobile offerings are still totally search-related. There's not even a mobile Gmail site, users can just forward messages to their phone or check mail via POP.

As search engines have expanded their offerings in an attempt to become users' main point of contact with the Web, adding in mobile functionality will be important to them for the next generation of growth. While search may be the jumping off point, it's going to be key to quickly roll in all the other services users want, to reduce the barriers between the mobile and fixed Internet and deliver the same services, regardless of device or underlying network. The promise of the mobile Internet remains largely unfulfilled, for whatever reason, but users are hungry for it to be an extension of the Net they're used to, rather than a separate subset with its own content and services.

Search engines began as a way to make the Web manageable, and portals helped make it useful for the average user. Mobile portals have, largely unsuccessfully, tried to do the same thing. Building services on top of search for mobile users -- assuming operators will let subscribers access them -- may help the mobile Internet gain even greater traction.