Mobile search is a service looking for a constituency today, but it will find that audience, and soon. That was the message of the first session yesterday of the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo 2005 in San Jose, CA, where the audience heard what Yahoo!, Google and America Online have in store for their cell phones.

Mihir Shah, director of product management for Yahoo! Mobile, made the case for bringing search functions to mobile phones by listing the market drivers for the space. For their part, he said, telecom carriers want to see mobile search succeed to boost average revenue per user. But consumers are adopting enhanced mobile services on their own: Forecasts hold that 79% of all mobile handsets shipped in 2008 will be Internet-ready. By that time, the proportion of U.S. wireless Internet users will grow from 26% today to 45%. And those mobile data subscribers will spend $1 billion to access or download content to their wireless devices — provided, he said, they can use robust mobile search techniques to locate it.

Yahoo expanded its mobile search programs one month ago with the introduction of a short message service (SMS) search and an extension of its Web search. Yahoo SMS allows users to address short text messages to 94266 (alphanumeric for “Yahoo”) and use simple shortcuts to get useful information, such as weather reports, stock quotes, nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and local information for a given ZIP Code.

Last year, Yahoo! began making full Web search available to mobile devices with HTML browsers. But that includes only a small fraction of mobile users, mostly those with large-screen pagers or PDAs. Also last month, Yahoo! announced its mobile.yahoo.com site would also begin serving handsets that use Wireless application Protocol (WAP) 2.0, the majority of the Internet-ready mobile base in this country.

At the SES conference, phone maker Nokia announced that Yahoo! Search will be one of three search services involved in a pilot to bring new Web search software to Nokia smartphone users in Sweden, Finland and the U.K. Users will be able to use a single menu button on their phone screens to search for Web sites, images, news, weather, ringtones and games, then connect directly to view those sites. Users will also have access to local directories tailored to their national markets.

Matthew Snyder, director of strategies and business development for Nokia Multimedia, pointed out that of 2 billion mobile phones in use today, about 1.2 billion have built-in browsers. But only 300 million of those actually get used for searching the Web. “Every day, each desktop computer sees an average of two searches, while for the average mobile phone, we’re looking at one search every 30 days,” Snyder said. “Each month, 10% of users use their mobile browsers once.” That disparity is due largely to the difficulty of performing search on mobile devices, he said.

“Having the right enablers built into the device to make it easy to access these Internet services is really the key,” he said. “Nokia is attempting the challenge of finding the right application, the right device to make that access easy.”

Coremetrics and Yahoo Form Data Partnership Coremetrics Inc., a San Mateo, CA-based Internet marketing services firm has signed a partnership agreement with Yahoo Search Marketing to provide enhanced reporting and click stream data for online advertisers, including click through- and conversion rates and other behavioral data.

Under terms of the agreement, Coremetrics’s online search marketing clients can choose whether to share click stream data with Yahoo to curtail unwanted click responses.

The partnership will enable advertisers using keywords to better understand the results of search marketing program marketing results, according to John Squire, vice president of products for Coremetrics.

Mobile search is a service looking for a constituency today, but it will find that audience, and soon. That was the message of the first session yesterday of the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo 2005 in San Jose, CA, where the audience heard what Yahoo!, Google and America Online have in store for their cell phones.

Mihir Shah, director of product management for Yahoo! Mobile, made the case for bringing search functions to mobile phones by listing the market drivers for the space. For their part, he said, telecom carriers want to see mobile search succeed to boost average revenue per user. But consumers are adopting enhanced mobile services on their own: Forecasts hold that 79% of all mobile handsets shipped in 2008 will be Internet-ready. By that time, the proportion of U.S. wireless Internet users will grow from 26% today to 45%. And those mobile data subscribers will spend $1 billion to access or download content to their wireless devices — provided, he said, they can use robust mobile search techniques to locate it.

Yahoo expanded its mobile search programs one month ago with the introduction of a short message service (SMS) search and an extension of its Web search. Yahoo SMS allows users to address short text messages to 94266 (alphanumeric for “Yahoo”) and use simple shortcuts to get useful information, such as weather reports, stock quotes, nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and local information for a given ZIP Code.

Last year, Yahoo! began making full Web search available to mobile devices with HTML browsers. But that includes only a small fraction of mobile users, mostly those with large-screen pagers or PDAs. Also last month, Yahoo! announced its mobile.yahoo.com site would also begin serving handsets that use Wireless application Protocol (WAP) 2.0, the majority of the Internet-ready mobile base in this country.

At the SES conference, phone maker Nokia announced that Yahoo! Search will be one of three search services involved in a pilot to bring new Web search software to Nokia smartphone users in Sweden, Finland and the U.K. Users will be able to use a single menu button on their phone screens to search for Web sites, images, news, weather, ringtones and games, then connect directly to view those sites. Users will also have access to local directories tailored to their national markets.

Matthew Snyder, director of strategies and business development for Nokia Multimedia, pointed out that of 2 billion mobile phones in use today, about 1.2 billion have built-in browsers. But only 300 million of those actually get used for searching the Web. “Every day, each desktop computer sees an average of two searches, while for the average mobile phone, we’re looking at one search every 30 days,” Snyder said. “Each month, 10% of users use their mobile browsers once.” That disparity is due largely to the difficulty of performing search on mobile devices, he said.

“Having the right enablers built into the device to make it easy to access these Internet services is really the key,” he said. “Nokia is attempting the challenge of finding the right application, the right device to make that access easy.”