John Whelan is Off Portal and Off Net!

Why Mobile Search doesn't work

Many search engine providers such as Google (who?) provide a "specialised" mobile version of their search tool. Others such as Exalead and Motion Bridge offer search engines specifically designed for the mobile interface.

However I believe that Mobile search is very different to PC based search and will never work effectively in its present form.

Reason 1: "skimming": Internet search is all about skimming the results. Most PC search engines return the search text highlighted as it appears in context within the page. The human brain is very quick at scanning these results to establish if it is what they are looking for. This happens subconsciously. To prove it I suggest you time yourself next time you do a search. See how quickly you click the next button to see the next page of results or to view a particular page you have decide is worthy of further inspection. On the tiny screen of a phone it is not possible to view such detail without scrolling down through pages of text. It takes far far longer.


Reason 2: Tiny Screen: Google on the PC for example gives you by default 10 results on first page. On the mobile phone this is reduced to 5 due to lack of real estate. If this wasn't bad enough the search usually just returns the title of the page. This can very often be meaningless in relation to the specific search term. This leads to a very frustrating and time consuming exercise, where the user select try several WAP sites results purely on the basis of the page title.


Reason 3: Shoe-horning Web sites onto mobile devices: Many mobile search engines - in particular Google - default to search the PC internet. Surely it makes far more sense to search the mobile internet on a mobile device. Especially when the vast majority of PC sites will not render properly on mobile browsers.

The end result is that mobile users will not use search. This is why Tribes was developed as it offers a totally new way to find mobile content. The tribes toolbar is persistent in every site you visit and it learns your preferences in order to bring you to the sites you need.



Look our for next week's installment in this series entitled " Why Mobile Portals don't work".

posted by alatto @ 12:16 PM