While most of the week’s discussion has centered on Google and the damage it’s new handheld alliance might inflict mostly on Nokia, it does raise the issue of just how does Nokia strike back into the heartland of Google, the search engine.
For those of us that sit at desks all day ‘Google-ing’ has become a way of life, while others who are not desk bound are still familiar with Google as the first and foremost search tool. But while Nokia is being perceived as having the ground in mobile web taken from under its feet by Google, Nokia is planning to take the search ground from under Google’s feet.
None of this is secret, but the ownership of Navteq, the mapping company, combined with long standing search and directory partnerships all over the world, are building Nokia search quietly towards being a genuine rival.
On a handset you not only need to search, but if you are looking for a restaurant in the city you are in, you need to merge the application with mapping software and Nokia this week added a considerable number of new partners to extend search, mostly this week they were in South America.
Over the past two years, Nokia Search has been increasing users by 22% a month, and increasing searches by 24% a month and now Nokia has added new local search providers, from 15 countries across Latin America. That brings the total number of countries with local search up to 38.
The three new local search providers are Publicar in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Listaonline in Brazil and Seccion Amarilla in Mexico.
Nokia Search is a simple web download to a PC uploaded to a Nokia handset and like a lot of search applications it searches either Yahoo or Windows Live for web search or if you are in Russia or China then it search Yandex or Baidu, or any of its 25 local search partners, or it searches data on your own device. When it searches local partners it offers click to dial, map, directions or save to directory options for each search result, where it is integrated on Nokia Maps, which are currently not on every Nokia device, but which soon will be.
Additionally this week Vodafone and Nokia said they had signed an agreement to integrate Vodafone services on Nokia handsets as well as its own Ovi Services, with some of these devices to be sold exclusively by Vodafone.
This seems to us an accommodation by the largest cellular operator in the world (by revenue) and the new Ovi strategy from Nokia, with Vodafone happy to give its own services and Nokia services parity on the device, which is a far better outcome than has come from previous Nokia and Vodafone confrontations.
Customers will get access to communications, content, Internet services and browsing from either party with one button push, the two companies said including access to both Vodafone’s new music service and the Nokia Music Store.