MSearchGroove

Monday marks the formal launch of the Taptu mobile search service we’ve been following since the start. But in the months since I tested it, and reviewed it here, the mobile search service has evolved to do more than deliver genuinely useful and relevant content in less than 10 clicks (true to its marketing motto); it has cleverly harnessed the wisdom of crowds to bubble up popular content that computer-generated algorithms tend to ignore.

Put simply, Taptu doesn’t only use Web crawling techniques; it deep-dives into destinations to extract social relevancy scores. In plain text, this means it factors in the popularity scores on social networking sites such as MySpace to rank music tracks. Taptu calls this approach “social-assisted search” (SAS) and it has some significant advantages over universal search – not the least of which is its inherent ability to expose the legendary long tail of content.

For now, Taptu’s SAS approach will do the heavy-lifting and uncover useful music and fact-finding content. For all the other flavors of content, the company will rely on algorithms much like all the other mobile search engine providers.

Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, puts it this way: “Without it (SAS), we fall back to the 25 or more clicks that you normally see in today’s mobile search engines. So for searches outside music, Taptu doesn’t perform any better today than the big 3 mobile search engines (for us, the big 3 means Google, Yahoo and Microsoft). This will change as we switch on SAS for other big categories like movies, travel, sport, games, and mobile web. Then you’ll really see what SAS can do.” If you want to see what SAS can do NOW, then check out this video. (Thanks to Bob Last, Taptu’s head of business development, for making it available to MSG!)

Taptu is available from http://taptu.mobi and this first release has been optimized for the top 20 handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola and the iPhone. With Taptu, mobile users can also find rich content results that include playable audio and video.

So why people-powered search? Because search engines that rely on link and text-based computations is an approach that patently promotes search engine optimized sites over the truly optimal ones. Against this backdrop, an approach that effectively infuses human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms, to pinpoint truly relevant information, is a great way to restore some balance to our search experiences and results.

But this isn’t just my view as a convert to Web 2.0 and a strong believer in the sustainability of all things open. This is the result of extensive research into the topic of social search (in part for an in-depth analysis of the topic slated to appear in the November issue of eContent). The advance of people-powered search engines ranging from Wikia, a search service slated to launch toward the end of this year that combines computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing, to NosyJoe, a private beta social search engine that relies on people to “sniff the Web for interesting content” are proof that this is no fad.

BTW: Taptu has also released a Facebook application called Music Wall that uses SAS to help Facebook users to find cool music on the Internet. This very Web 2.0 app walks the talk, allowing users to add the music they find to their profiles: It’s not hard to imagine how this will work on mobile – and Bob assures me future releases will include a unique social network to mobile integration.

• Posted in
• Web 2.0, Mobile Social Networking, Mobile Search, Mobile Music, Mobile Advertising

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