As MSG reported earlier this week, Taptu is fine-tuning its “socially-assisted” mobile search service to suggest stuff we’re bound to like and related searches we’re likely to appreciate and explore during the dull moments of our daily routine (while we’re waiting around or just in search of a way to pass the time – no pun intended!).

The enhancements are the logical next step in the company’s ongoing strategy to place human interaction and judgment at the center of the mobile search experience.

As Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, put it in a recent interview with MSG, search is social. Users are not content to search for information in isolation and they want to communicate what they find. “When you’re on a mobile device, most [of what you do] has some kind of social context….You don’t finish the process as a user until you’ve interacted with somebody. So we think that finding the search results is not the end of the process; sharing the search result with somebody [marks] the end of the process, and that has to be designed into the system.”

To this end Taptu has launched 1-Tap, a feature of its mobile search service that – true to its name – lets users share their mobile search results (including cool mobile content) in one click. To save users from typing in their friends’ details, 1-Tap can also tap into other services such as Web-based email and Twitter.

But sharing is just the first step in Taptu’s ambitious strategy to give users more of a say in their mobile search results. Look for the company to innovate in the area of enabling “human-assisted results” (tools and technologies that allow people to edit their search results) and indexing social information (such as the social graph) moving forward.

Might Taptu be on to something bigger than pure PageRank?

Steve walked me through social search, search advertising and his pick of trends in this recent podcast.

His views are as impactful today as they were then – one reason why I have chosen to feature this podcast here and on ReadWriteTalk, the podcast series broadcast on ReadWriteWeb (RWW) and across its network of sites. Regular readers will recall that MSG has a close partnership with AltSearchEngines - a RWW destination dubbed “THE voice of alternative search.”

Listen to the podcast here [12:55]

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Among the highlights:

MOBILE ADVERTISING: “We want to see specific targeting of mobile ads around search terms. At the moment there isn’t a sell-side marketplace for this, so if you have a lot of inventory – a lot of advertising inventory that is linked to search terms – there’s no open marketplace in the mobile ecosystem where you can sell that inventory. And that’s the first step because we’ve got to make these ads specific to the intention of the searcher because, that way, they’re a lot more relevant and they’re a lot more useful.”

LOCAL SEARCH: Indications are it’s not the draw we think it is. “When we look at the mobile search logs, we don’t see a lot of evidence for people searching for local services or Starbuck’s or pizza. It doesn’t show up very high in the list of search terms….The evidence is that they’re not so much interested in local, and this fits in with the pattern of people’s lives. Most people don’t spend the majority of their time traveling away from their normal locales, and most people are either at home or in the office or in three or four other places that they know quite well.”

CRAWLING & INDEXING: Letting people search for people and peruse all the UGC content flourishing under the radar of universal search engines may be essential is search is to become a mass-market activity. “Most of the social information we [users] would like to search on … lives in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. It would be great if search engines could crawl and index that stuff so you could find it quickly.”

My take?

I stand by this summary quote, which Taptu also chose to publish on the cover of its white paper, Making Search Social: Unleashing search for the mobile generation. (You can download it here.)

“Taptu not only recognizes the importance of injecting human preferences and human judgments into computer algorithms to pinpoint truly relevant information; it has taken the lead in allowing people to communicate those results easily to their peers.

“In the past, if users wanted to make themselves heard they created a Web page. What we’re seeing now with Taptu is the potential for communities to form based on their search behavior and passion for results that reflect what humans want and not what algorithms dictate.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Local Search, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.