MSearchGroove

In-Brief: Microsoft acquires search company, but can it wring value out of mobile search for the enterprise? 

For a start, I can’t say I was terribly surprised by the news today that Microsoft will acquire Norway’s Fast Search & Transfer for a cool $1.23 billion. The sudden departure of Mike “Mr. Mobile Search” Brady last year was a clear signal to expect some significant changes. This was reinforced by the company’s tie-up with Japan’s Rakuten and my own exclusive Q&A later with Ryan Jones, FAST’s Director of Telecom & Media Product Marketing, who succeeded Mike. However, I expected a change in direction not ownership.

FAST, often dismissed as the one player in the space that knew the least about mobile search (but understood enterprise search best thanks to its corporate DNA), has apparently turned a problem into an opportunity. Read between the lines of today’s coverage and the discussion is not so much about how this move might boost Microsoft’s own mobile search prowess; it’s more focused on how FAST’s search capabilities can provide an interface to business apps and content.

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• Recommendation, Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising, Enterprise Search, Content Discovery

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NOKIA: I have tracked Nokia’s move into mobile search from the start. Today it extends Nokia Search (which bundles an impressive ecosystem of local search providers together in one downloadable app) to 15 countries across Latin America. (BTW: Nokia Search is integrated with Nokia Maps on select Nokia mobile phones, including S40 devices.)

In Latin America, users can now search and access local directory content from Publicar (www.paginasamarillas.com) in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, with Lista (www.Listaonline.com.br) in Brazil and Seccion Amarilla (www.seccionamarilla.com) in Mexico. Nokia Search also has web content and local directory content search available for an additional 23 countries.

How many use it? The company claims that, over the past two years, “Nokia Search has steadily swelled, increasing its users by 22 percent every month, with the number of searches made by those users up 24 percent on a monthly basis.”

GOOGLE:A fact-packed article written by Google researchers and published by the IEEE Computer Society deep-dives in to data from more than one million page-view requests randomly sampled from Google logs during a one month period earlier this year. I’ll provide some highlights – but it’s best to download the PDF here because there’s a lot of detail that’s too good to miss.

Predictably, “adult” tops the list categories in mobile search. The researchers reckon this is because (1) mobile search is simply following the same trend as we saw in the online space (2) users might feel more comfortable querying adult terms on their private and personal devices.

The average mobile query was 2.56 words and 16.8 characters. The surprise: you would expect users to input shorter queries given the poor usability of mobile devices (tiny keypads & small screens) across the board.

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• Mobile Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Local Search, Enterprise Search, Content Discovery

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