Why most emerging mobile search technologies will fail

Microsoft recently announced a new search technology called Photo2Search, which would allow a user to search web databases using cameraphone photos - the search would return relevant results as would a text query.  Another mobile search idea is to install barcode scanning technology on cellular phones so users can 'scan' products while shopping to get instant access to product info. 

 

It is clear that mobile search technology is moving, however it is not moving forward.   Mobile users will soon agree on one golden rule for mobile search - there should be one portal which gives me access to all the information I need.  As of now, Google is the one portal that lives up to that rule on the home computer.  However, searching on a mobile device using Google, or any other portal, is problematic because multi-tapping on a phone keypad is too cumbersome.  There is no one mobile portal or solution that meets the golden rule.   To overcome the keypad problem, Google's competitors are trying to come up with solutions to substitute text input with barcodes, photos, voice, etc...

 

The mobile market has not only developed a bad case of amnesia of Google Number Search, but is headed down the wrong road.  More and more subscriptions are being offered to users by carriers that limit users to a small selection of content. When users are offered search capabilities, the results and efficiency of use are far inferior to what they can get on their computer at home. Shrinking a user's web experience or search capabilities will not work in the long run.  Even predictive text technology, which is becoming ubiqitous as the staple technology of mobile search solutions firms like Jumptap (not related to this blog or its editor), will not survive because it is more so much more demanding than GNS on the user. Although both methods require roughly the same number of keystrokes, T9 requires twice the users' attention and faculties than GNS because it requires simultaneous attention on keypressing AND repetitive (visual) scanning of possible results for each keypress, whereas GNS requires attention only to inputing the query.

 

Google Number Search has the optimal flexibility for mobile search.  It's strength over other mobile search technologies is that it enables the user to locate ANY results on the World Wide Web (Google's index) using a simple interface and set of rules.  GNS allows the user to incorporate very basic and fundamental tools into their mobile search such as the wildcard (asterisk), quotes (number one), spacing (zero) and manual search/override (NUM).

 

One only needs to experiment for oneself the power of number search using allnum: or num: on Google search.