Does Yahoo! Have the Answer for Mobile Search?

It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating: Mobile marketing is going to depend on making the mobile Internet easier to access. Handsets are going to have to get easier to use, with real keypads rather than the “hit once for a, twice for b” finger workouts. Carriers are going to have to make data plans easier to understand (not to mention cheaper, please—but that’s where the ads come in), so consumers feel free to access the Web over their phones without suffering whopping bills. In re content, Web sites are going to have to get easier to read and use on the small, small screen.

In fact, to get its user audience above the current 11% of U.S. cell phone owners (according to figures from Forrester Research), the mobile Internet is going to have to become more navigable altogether. Yahoo! is banking on an enhanced suite of mobile apps and a new dedicated mobile search function to do just that.

Earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Yahoo unveiled Go for Mobile 2.0 and Yahoo! oneSearch. The new releases revamp the whole navigation paradigm to reflect what users most often want from the mobile Web.

“People using the Internet on mobile phones are trying to do one of two things: trying to find an answer or trying to fill some time,” says Lee Ott, director of mobile Web in yahoo’s Connected Life division. “We want to help them do both.”

OneSearch is meant to get users their mobile answers with the least amount of effort. The feature makes some assumptions—for example, that someone who enters “Chicago Bears” in the query box is looking for the most recent scores and news about the football team, not the Lincoln Park Zoo.

The design strategy behind both Go for Mobile 2.0 and oneSearch, Ott says, was to try to discern what users were most likely looking for and give it to them with the fewest clicks, allowing as much personalization of content as users wish.

“The approach to date has been that you get a phone, you get a browser on it and you try to access the Web,” he says. “Unfortunately, the Web is designed primarily for a PC and doesn’t squish that elegantly onto your phone. With Yahoo! Go, we want to develop a mobile-optimized experience that makes those Internet-based applications really sing.”

The oneSearch design philosophy is “answers, not links,” Ott says. “PCs are about links and give me 2.4 million results when I search on any given term. I then click through, go back, and do a lot of page-loading which is very expensive and time-consuming on a mobile phone. Mobile searches are usually looking for a specific answer. With oneSearch, you’re going to experience those answers first, and faster.”

For example, someone who searches on “pizza” from a mobile phone probably isn’t interested in finding the main Web site for Pizza Hut—which would be high up in the results of a PC search on the term. Instead, they want pizza places in the neighborhood they’re in, along with directions, phone numbers and customer reviews.

PC-based searches ask users to categorize their search and specify that they’re looking for local information, or images, video or other content. But using the Yahoo! oneSearch query box, mobile searchers will get not only the top news results or scores but a listing of other popular results around the term, such as photos or video clips--any of which can be accessed with a single click.

For a deeper dive into a category of results, users can click on “Show me all” and scroll through all news stories on a subject, or all images or local listings. “Besides providing answers, our secondary purpose is to delight and entertain with the amount of information available,” Ott says. A user looking for movie times for “Dreamgirls” would also be able to access movie reviews, news items about the Oscar nominations it got, and photos and possibly ringtones from Beyonce, one of its stars.

Yahoo! Go for Mobile is a downloadable application suite that lets users access some of the most popular Yahoo! portal features in a mobile environment. This could stand as a powerful driver to bring more traffic to the mobile Web, since some of these features, such as Yahoo! Mail and photo site Flickr, are among the most heavily visited sites on the Internet.

Users will be able to engage deeply with these features, too. You can search the entire contents of your Yahoo! Mail account, and any items you delete will disappear from the Web-based version too. Users with a customized My Yahoo! Web page will see that customized content on Go for Mobile, including any stock trackers they’ve set or RSS feeds they’ve integrated.

A novel left-to-right “carousel” at the bottom of the screen offers a rolling menu of widgets that users can click to get news headlines, sports, weather, finance, entertainment and local search, as well as for Yahoo! e-mail and Flickr, Yahoo!’s photo-sharing Web site. The addition of Flickr to Go for Mobile may turn out to be particularly appealing, since with a single click users will be able to download any or all photos to a Flickr account. “It will free all those pictures that are now trapped in people’s phone cameras,” Ott says.

Both Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 and oneSearch make use of advanced caching and background loading to get around the slow content downloads that can plague wireless networks. The platform is also set up to take advantage of GPS location services, once those become available in a wider selection of phones.

Some industry observers have suggested that Yahoo! sees mobile as a kind of reset button for its search competition with Google, and that the company may in fact be able to win the lead in mobile search that has so far eluded it on the PC. Yahoo! has been aggressively signing deals to get Go for Mobile and oneSearch pre-loaded onto some of the most popular handsets, including new partnerships with Samsung and Motorola. (Google has a Samsung deal too.)

Yahoo! has also inked deals with Nokia and Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry line, and oneSearch will power the search functions on all mobile phone browsers from Opera, one of the largest software names in the field. In yesterday’s investor conference, Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel predicted that Yahoo! Go 2.0 will be available on more than 400 handset models by the end of this year.

OneSearch will also be bundled into the new Apple iPhone expected to ship this June. So will Google Search-- a fact that might make for some interesting on-board competition between the saerchengines. But if the iPhone catches on, mobile search will almost certainly reap the benefits in an expanded user base.

Ott says that the mobile search field is still wide open compared to desktop search, and he points out that, with a few lucky breaks, leadership in mobile search could turn out to be more crucial than in PC-based functions.

“As big as the Internet is now, mobile phones outnumber PCs something on the order of twelve to one,” he says. “For a large portion of the world, the mobile phone is not only the primary but the sole intersection with the Internet.”