Wednesday 14 November 2007

Future of Mobile: Discovery & Off Portal Search

by Steve Page (Mobile Commerce)

  • Discovery & off portal search

  • Currently provide local search & travel information on all mobile networks

  • Mobile Commerce are tech partner with yahoo for Orange off-portal search
    • Social networking sites are very much at the top
  • UK: 25 million searches a month
    • 3 times as many search requests coming from Google than from Yahoo
    • But three times as many click throughs coming from Yahoo
  • Vodafone contacted them and said moving to ad-supported, so they started setting up off-portal sites intending them to be found by search
  • WAP & Web backfill -- free discovery (see below)

  • Google mobile search is appalling
    • Not enough searches
    • Nobody goes down to click more
    • None of the mobile sites are linked to each other
  • However, finally got some stuff to the top on google mobile search
    • Spent about 8 months working out their findability
    • it's free!

    • Findability:
      • Personal contact at Yahoo very useful
      • Google ranks WML above XHTML -- mime types & DTDs really important

      • Need to submit site map & wait for crawl

      • Google uses Nokia 6220 as user agent -- weird device
      • Need to permit bots through robots.txt
  • Really good slide on discovery prioritisation for mobile operator portals

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