Porn, not 'localisation,' is what users are searching for

Content, not local information, is what most users are looking for when using search on their phones. And, as on the fixed Internet, much of that content is pornographic, Farhad Divecha, director of search-engine-marketing agency AccuraCast, told delegates at the recent Mobile Search Conference, held in London.

His assessment runs counter to the prevalent view in the industry that "localisation" is a magic bullet to spur take-up of mobile search services. But he says Google's fortunes in the mobile Internet space will mirror its success in the PC environment, even though it lacks localized content and a mobile-specific platform.

He says improvements in handset technology and mobile data speeds mean that the behavior of mobile Internet users is starting to mimic that of fixed-Internet users. According to Google's 2007 figures, subscribers are using their mobile handsets to search the Internet for more information and for longer periods than they did in 2005, indicating that people are using mobiles to access material that they are used to looking up on their PCs, Divecha says.

"Twenty-five percent of searches on the mobile web are actually for porn, and for these kinds of searches, localisation is completely irrelevant," he added. Just over 10 per cent of mobile web searches are for entertainment. He says it is a natural evolution of the market, given that mobile phones capable of browsing the Internet are becoming common.

He says Yahoo and other mobile search companies will have to compete at the same level as Google, delivering "good quality" web-based-content results to avoid being sidelined, since local search will be just a niche market. Google's sluggishness in optimizing its content for the mobile web presents an opportunity for rivals that want to exploit that niche, he adds.

But he says that as long as Google is the No. 1 Internet-search platform, it will continue to attract the bulk of advertising money, presenting carriers and rival search companies with an uphill battle to gain market share.

Martin Harris, senior vice president of sales at mobile-content-platform firm Bango, says Google's dominance in both the mobile and fixed Internet is such that "once you see Google on your phone, you don't forget about it."

And Google's figures show that subscribers are typing more queries per session on the mobile Internet than they were in 2005, though this could indicate that users are being forced to refine their searches because results are not relevant enough.

Peggy-Anne Salz, a chief analyst at mobile-search-research firm MSearchGroove.com, says "federated" search - in which automatically generated results are tailored by a search-firm employee to provide information relevant to the user's location - might be a way for startup search companies to market themselves as capable of returning the best results.

Before launching its Ovi web offering, handset maker Nokia studied how the limited real estate on handsets had curbed mobile web usage, according to Jussi-Pekka Partanen, Nokia's head of mobile search. He said that innovation must come from devices if the mobile web is to challenge server-based search.

In the past 18 months, North American operators Rogers Wireless and Sprint have attempted to circumvent the difficulty of keying in search terms on phones by deploying a voice-activation application on their devices. The application, supplied by Nuance Communications, recognizes the command and transcribes it into text, which is then sent to the search portal.

John West, Nuance's director of business development for mobile solutions, says some operators have reported a 50 per cent activation rate on devices embedded with the application, though he declined to disclose how it has affected data usage on either carrier's network.

This  article appeared in Mobile Media,  a sister publication of telecoms.com

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