Google Mobile’s Answer To Yahoo! OneSearch

28th March 2007

Google have just launched a new version of their mobile search service and it looks a lot like Yahoo! Mobile OneSearch with some added personalisation features.

The new version can be seen at:

Google Mobile Search

It includes the following changes:

No more options to search Images, local or mobile-friendlly pages
Instead, the algorithm automatically detects the nature and source of the query and automatically delivers the right type of content
Personalised home is differently personalised
Instead of the personalised home page that just imported the regular Google personalised home, the new one is more mobile specific, providing location specific news, weather, showtimes etc.
Memory of searcher’s locations
Once a location is entered, Google remembers it now, saving valuable keystrokes and time
Better quality
This part is a bit of a grey area (as usual). Google promises to deliver the exact content searchers are looking for within just one click. How exactly they will do this is anyoe’s guess!

Three simple tests have revealed pretty satisfactory answers:

Search for accuracast
The search brought up our home page and some other pages, same as the regular Google search. At the bottoms of the page were links to search images and news.
Search for Madonna
This brought up 2 images, one of some woman in Maryland and her child (akin to Madonna and child?) and the second image of the pop star, followed by links to her website and some fan sites etc, similar to regular Google search results.
Search for Iran British navy (or any other current news topic)
News headlines about the current conflict between the UK and Iran were shown as the first 2 listings, followed by relevant web pages and then some images such as the Iranian flag.

Yahoo! OneSearch and even MSN Mobile have been delivering content in a similar fashion for a while now, so in this case, Google is actually playing catch-up, for once!

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Discussion on social networks & blogs

Upcoming Yahoo! Ad Campaign | Search Daily News : 2 May 2007 at 3:55 pm

[...] Yahoo! are about to launch a television ad campaign to promote their OneSearch mobile product and Yahoo! Answers. We have the URL here for those of you who can’t wait for the campaign to go live: http://better.yahoo.com/ [...]
Universal Search by Google | Search Daily News : 17 May 2007 at 9:05 pm

[...] MSN and Yahoo! first implemented the principles of a single page that provided a variety of search results on their mobile search products. Google has done this to a limited extent for a while now. Today, though, they have more or less tried to launch the concept of a universal search results page. [...]

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