Google has been in the vanguard of trying to ensure that the mobile internet model and interface is driven from the traditional web business, rather than by the mobile specialists. Amid talk that the search giant will develop its own phone software or even its own handset, Yahoo has been somewhat overshadowed, despite its release of the important Go Mobile software at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. Now it is following that up with claims to have “reinvented search” with the announcement of its oneSearch offering.
According to Yahoo, oneSearch offers instant answers and uses the widget and interactive interface technologies on which the software house has focused heavily on its Go Mobile navigation system. According to Yahoo its new search capabilities will be implemented on every mobile phone that has a browser, with more than 85% of mobile users able to use the oneSearch service. Yahoo has based its new service on the idea that most users who search are looking for something locally, and want one result, not a list of web links. The service will first launch in the US, with select international markets targeted for later in the year.
There was a strong rumor in February that the major cellcos would jointly launch their own mobile search engine at the 3GSM trade show. Although this failed to materialize, it did highlight the fact that current search engines are poorly adapted for small screens and mobile interfaces, and the company that manages to address this problem will have a good shot at dominating the mobile internet. Yahoo has a particular interest in this, because it has ceded leadership on its traditional platforms to Google.
The two companies are pushing different approaches to the mobile internet experience as they do on the desktop. A key difference is that Google supports a far more purely browser-based approach to development and user interface than does Yahoo, relying heavily on techniques like Ajax in key applications such as mobile Gmail, while its rival bases its efforts on semi-proprietary widgets, as does Apple. Google is putting significant effort into addressing the key failings of pure internet technologies, notably a lack of richness and functionality that can detract from the obvious advantage of cross-platform development and user flexibility. Yahoo, meanwhile, aims to make its widgets – enshrined in mobile architectures like Go Mobile – so ubiquitous that their more closed nature becomes unimportant, a goal clearly shared with Apple.
Yahoo itself is taking its widgets aggressively into the mobile world in a bid to steal a march on Google, which has more formidable technical challenges to translate its purer browser-based approach to the cellphone format. Yahoo’s Go Mobile, whose second release was unleashed at CES, represents the search giant’s strongest bet yet on the mobile internet market. Go 2.0 for Mobile is a downloadable application with an interface featuring a carousel design, for user navigation between a selection of Yahoo widgets, including email, local search and maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, weather, photo sharing and search. The overall concept is similar to that of the new iPhone interface, but each widget includes a ‘command center’ where users can discover further content according to their specific interests – for instance, by using watch lists to track topics or add new content via RSS feeds.