March 21, 2007 | Wednesday

Testing the new Yahoo mobile search service

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Search Engines |Yahoo |Search Technology

Yahoo announced yesterday the launch of their Yahoo oneSearch, a new mobile search service meant to simplify and expand what cell phone users get from their mobile searching experience. (The name of the blog post launching the service is entitled, ”Because your phone is not a PC”.)

I suppose there may be some debate over whether or not a person who’s just looking for a pizza place in their postcode really wants or need both business listings AND Wikipedia entries on pizza AND Flickr pages tagged with the word pizza. But since when is it a crime for businesses to over-deliver? Yahoo clearly thinks that - as we have been hearing (and saying ourselves) for some time, this is the moment for mobile search to go mainstream.

I just happen to be in the US right now, so whipped out my Blackberry and gave oneSearch a try, entering the keyword painter (I really need someone local to come in and spruce up a couple of walls in my new office). It looks like the service still needs some tweaking, as I got lots of results for Corel software and Wikipedia’s entry on painting, and oneSearch seemed to think I was in New York City (I’m not), but I can really see the need for a service that does function the way oneSearch is intended to. As Marco Boerries, SVP of Yahoo Connected Life says:

Mobile is the future of the Internet — just look at the numbers! In 2005, there were 896 million PC’s and 2.14 billion mobile phones, and that gap is projected to only increase. By 2010, there will be 1.35 billion PC’s and 4 billion mobile phones. We just need to think differently about how to translate desktop content to the small screen.