Search startups vie for position in mobile market
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InfoWorld - Leading search companies Google and Yahoo didn't appear to have a presence at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Francisco this week, but their startup competitors and smaller rival AOL were all angling for influence over mobile search.
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Here&#8217;s a nice overview piece &#8212; together with the requisite &#8220;who will win?&#8221; dramatic elements &#8212; from BusinessWeek, covering mobile search:  The emergence of Internet-connected mobile phones, or what&#8217;s known as the Mobile Web, is turning the wireless search business into a horse race&#8212;one that&#8217;s too close to call. Unlike its dominant role in search [...]
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The race is on: A consortium of 32 companies has joined a classic battle for primacy with their demonstration of mobile phones to compete with devices that will run Google Inc.'s fledgling Android operating system.
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Startups in the mobile search market explained why operators might not want to partner with Google or Yahoo.
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A few big brains in Palo Alto want to ease the corporate stranglehold on mobile communication. By Robert Strohmeyer from Wired magazine.
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Search optimization for mobile sites presents many challenges already familiar to search marketers, yet adds different twists that make it unique.
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(InfoWorld) - Fast Search & TransferÂ and InfoSpaceÂ have expanded the scope of a years-long collaboration in mobile search, aiming to improve the technology they offer to carriers and end users. The companies have developed a hosted search service they will offer to carriers, which in turn can offer it under their own brand, Fast Search and InfoSpace announced Monday. In recent years, Fast Search and InfoSpace have provided mobile search engines to carriers -- individually and jointly -- but this new service represents a deeper partnership that goes beyond joint licensing and marketing. It involves ongoing research and development as the vendors seek to edge out competitors in mobile search functionality. They will focus on improvements to the search index, development of a mobile ad platform, expansion of their existing filtering and recommendation capabilities, and refinement of "zero term" search, in which content is pushed out to users based on their preferences and profiles and without requiring a keyword query, said Michael Brady, Fast Search's senior director of mobile business development. Since 2001, Fast Search has focused on the enterprise search market, but it is convinced consumer mobile search is worth pursuing because it is expected to grow significantly in users and advertising revenue in the coming years, Brady said. InfoSpace specializes in mobile content delivery and search. Industry analyst Iain Gillott of iGR said carriers feel more comfortable with "white-label" deals because they like to maintain as much control as possible over subscribers. Having GoogleÂ or YahooÂ pushing ads directly to their customers terrifies them, Gillott said. A big challenge mobile search providers will face is getting users comfortable with search on their cell phones. "Search isn't the first thing that jumps to mind when you open up your phone," Gillott said. Fast Search and InfoSpace will need to work with carriers to make their search engine visible and easily accessible on handsets, he said. The mobile search ad market is so small and new that Jupiter Research considered it almost nonexistent until the end of 2006, although the market research company plans to issue a forecast for it this year, analyst Julie Ask said. There is no clear market leader at this very early stage of the game. The main ad-related challenge for mobile search providers will be to gain a big enough audience for their inventories of ads, Ask said. Then comes the issue of relevance. "If I am online and type 'Bruce Springsteen' into Google, I receive 2.75 million listings. This is useless on a mobile device. They need to assume that I have intentions that are different on a mobile device than on my PC," Ask said. For example, if a user enters the name of a recording artist such as Springsteen, the mobile search engine should assume the user may be looking for ringtones, wallpaper photos, or concert tickets, Ask wrote.
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The search giant seeks success with the biggest and the best.
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Yahoo! has announced the debut of a new suite of search services for mobile users at the CTIA conference. This new search offering enables mobile consumers to search for local information, images and Web resources on mobile devices.
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ChaCha, a search engine powered by people, is hoping that it will be more popular on the mobile phone than it was on the Web.
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Yahoo has sprung a surprise in the Internet world with its new offering: Yahoo search engine on mobile. With this mobile users can access yahoo search with their mobile phones.
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The popularity of mobiles packed with features is set to explode as they get better and cheaper, say analysts.
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Companies such as JumpTap and Medio offer technologies to operators that include self-branded search tools for their mobile users.
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Company turns up the heat in the mobile Web market with with launch of tool that aggregates messaging and social-networking information for cell phone users.
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Internet portal Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) has launched a mobile search service, based on text messaging, that enables users of the Yahoo Local search engine to send query results from a PC directly to a cell phone.
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By Oren Dorell  The same technology that keeps cellphone users in touch with their cellphone companies can also help locate people who are lost.
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A new startup hopes to draw cell phone users with a service that allows them to design channel lineups for watching videos on their phones.