Mobile Search Important — Not Web Search On Mobiles

A new report from Informa Telecoms & Media, Mobile Search & Content Discovery, said that porting Web search solutions directly to the mobile internet isn’t going to work very well. “Search paired with personalization, which involves matching the right content to the right users, and recommendation is a much more powerful combination,” said Peggy Anne Salz, author of the report (Disclaimer: also a writer for us). She said basic mobile search “places the burden on users to know what they want and grapple with handset limitations such as screen size. However, personalized search will ensure that content matches based on information such as users profiles, preferences, click history, time of day and location, will encourage users to explore the content at their finger tips and discover content they didn’t know they wanted in the first place, thus driving additional data revenues”.
It’s a point — operators know far more about their users than the average search engine. It makes sense to use that information to arrange search responses to better fit the searchers demographic, and could be a way to combat the moves of search companies to grab the user from the carrier.