The Importance of Mobile Search - The Gloves Have Come Off

The gloves are coming off in the United States mobile search market because of a vibrant ad environment and strong pushes by portals.

Companies who care about mobile marketing and the marketing environment as a whole are paying attention to forecasts, statistics and projections. Take, for example, the eMarketer projection that by 2011 mobile search will account for around $715 million, or almost 15 percent of the total mobile advertising market.

Projections of the total market value vary, but this category is growing at an unbelievable rate, and is red hot for many companies ready to strike. Now is the time for marketers to jump into mobile search with some form of meaningful budget to start climbing the learning curve.

This is how an analyst at eMarketer, John du Pre Gauntt, put it:

"Mobile search in the US has all the right parts on the table: a huge online advertising ecosystem, the world's leading content industry, massive portal players, major league mobile operators and a host of VC-backed start-ups.
In other words, it'll be a bloody mess over the next few years sorting out the center of gravity for mobile search, as each player tries to convince the others to follow its lead. The good news for marketers is that there's enough of a prize for the winner(s) that resolution will come."

There are some subtle differences between standard Web search (done on a desktop, for example) and done on a mobile devide (like an I-Phone or a Blackberry). For one, in the short term, consumers are likely to use several different mobile search modes or providers, instead of converging around a single solution. Equally important for the success of mobile search is the integration of national and local search results.

There are several types of mobile search. The primary forms are as follows:

Mobile optimized search engines are simply search engines that take the limited capacity, both in RAM and connection speed, of most mobile phones. Most major search engines have implemented a mobile optimized version of their products that take into consideration bandwidth, and form factor limitations of the mobile platform.

Mobile "question and answer" is another form of mobile search, and it allows a user to text a question to a central database and receive a reply using text-messages. Some of these services are automated, and many even have peer-generated responses, adding a layer of human-based response to the search query.

Mobile directory search services allow users to find local services in the vicinity of their current location.

Mobile discovery services offer users recommendations on what they should do next. Some of these are based on previous activities, while others are based on what peers have done.

Mobile navigation services - these services provide the indexing structure to the portals provided by mobile operators.

Dynamic Mobile Selection Interface Services, a new category of mobile search tool, is one in which a pre-selected set of possible search content is downloaded in advance by a mobile user and then allows for a final Internet search step.

As mobile search develops, search companies are helping users find what they're looking for faster, and making sure you understand the different types of search will help you market your services to this new breed of mobile customers.