Say goodbye to Dodgeball. Say Hello to Four....

It looks like WordDial won't be needing 363432255.com anymore. Dodgeball, which that numeric domain spells, is one of six services that Google is closing down. Dodgeball was acquired by Google in 2005. You may remember that its founders left their positions with Google in disgust in 2007 over Google's apathy towards the ingenious find-your-friends social networking mobile service.

Rumor has it that Dodgeball's original founders are going to clone the killed service and call it Four Square. Don't blame us if we're wrong but do credit us if we're right if you successfully register 3687778273.com (FOUR SQUARE).

Google Product Search now on WordDial's 'Search' portal

It's no surprise that WordDial owns the dotcom wordnumbers for 'Product' (7763828.com) and 'Froogle' (3766453.com), but it has taken until this month for Google to ask WordDial to include listings for Google Product Search (formerly Froogle).

The link to 'Google Product Search' appears at actually NOT the page at 3766453.com (since Froogle is no longer being marketed), but rather at the portals for Product (7763828.com) and Search (732724.com). WordDial's domain 77638287.com (Products) conveniently redirects to 7763828.com (Product).

Links to Google and its various product offerings have appeared in WordDial's directory portals for a number of years. One of the most interesting domains that Google 'leased' from WordDial is 48273426.com (Guardian). That was part of a temporary marketing strategy whereby Google Inc. "wanted its brand name to be synonymous with the word 'Guardian,' and thus security." Through mid-2007, the three top slots at the 'Search' portal were different mobile URLs to get to Google Mobile - the 'Search' portal was vastly cleaned up in July 2007.

Google is one of the pioneers in the wordnumber concept and since forever (in Internet years) has owned several dotcom wordnumbers of its own brands including 466453.com (Google), and 46245.com (GMail).

Masterlist of dotTLD wordnumbers

Masterlist of dotTLD (com/net/mobi/co.uk) brand wordnumbers owned by internet companies; only hyperlinked TLDs are set to resolve:

ChaCha - 242242.com/net/mobi/co.uk
3663 First For Foodservice - 3663.co.uk
Expedia - 3973342.net
4Info - 44636.com/net/mobi
Gmail - 46245.com - doesn't resolve
Google - 466453.com
GoogleMail- 4664536245.com/net - doesn't resolve
Sony - 47669.com/mobi
Reuters - 7388377.mobi - doesn't resolve
Yahoo - 92466.mobi/.net/co.uk
Where 411 - 94373.net
WordDial - 96733425.com

This list - currently under construction - is for informational use only and comprises soley brand (non-generics) wordnumbers.

A NNNNN.com case study: 95539.com and Google

Over the past few days, a buzz has been going around about NNNNN.com's, dotcom domain names consisting of five numbers. (A website, listed in our NuDom Roll, which we just created on the (right) sidebar, has even been launched to devote discussion just to the topic of the 'countdown' to the day when there are no NNNNN.com's left.) There are all sorts of reasons why domainers are registering NNNNN.com's, however the most common reason has been for zip codes. Internet companies, such as Marchex, Inc., have been, for years, buying up NNNNN.tld's that correspond with U.S. zip codes and incorporating them into online directory networks. On the product listing page of Marchex's website, it states that the company 'owns and operates a network of more than 200,000 local and vertical Web sites....Example Web sites include...tens of thousands of ZIP Code Web sites, such as www.90210.com covering 96% of all ZIP Code areas nationwide.'

Adding our 2 cents to this buzz, we remember when, in 2006, Google, Inc., owned the five-digit pure numeric domain 95539.com, which redirected to Google.com. The mystery of why did Google own that domain hasn't been solved - at least to our knowledge. We did research - way back 'then' - and figured out that it had something to do with the Chinese marketplace. 95539.com fell within a range of popular (registered) domains beginning with 955**.com that were being developed in China. Those dotcom five-digit numeric domains corresponded with the five-digit telephone 'shortcodes' for many service hotlines of Chinese banks, insurance companies and so on. Those Chinese companies were registering and developing (or redirecting) numeric domains that corresponded with their hotline/shortcode. Chinese companies were building on a trend that U.S. internet companies had begun early on but hasn't caught on. One example in the U.S. is 47669.com (47669, or 4SONY, is the shortcode owned by SONY).

We could never figure out if Google was going to set up a hotline number at 95539 for Google China. In 2007, 95539.com redirected to cs-air.com, a website for China Southern Airlines whose HotLine number in China is (8620) 95539. (Cs-air.com now redirects to Csair.com, the main website for Chinese visitors to China Southern Airlines.) In 2008, 95539.com appears to be owned by a domainer in China who is building a website portal for airlines.

Google's 466453.com

Alexa rank for Google.com: 1

Alexa rank for 466453.com: 8,907,013

Number of keytaps saved by visiting 466453.com instead of mobile.google.com on your mobile phone: 22

Google homepage 411

Google Blogoscoped blogged about 'everything you always wanted to know about the Google homepage but were afraid to ask' yesterday and answered its own question, Is there a special mobile version of the Google homepage around?, with the following answer:

Yes, there is, and you might be automatically directed to it when accessing Google.com – or 466453.com (the numbers when you type “google” on certain hand phones) – though you can also view it on a desktop browser. Also, a special version of the mobile variant is available for the iPhone. (Though in theory, special mobile versions aren’t needed as HTML was designed to work across different systems... but that’s just the theory.)

'Spell with keypad,' Google says. And the mobile world awakes.

Google has breathed the first gust of air into its master mobile plan. It has spoken the simple, unassuming words ' spell with keypad ' and, without knowing it, millions of mobile phone users have been audience to Google's quiet initiation into the greatest technological revolution that the world has ever seen. What is so significant about those three words? On Google's cheatsheat page for GOOG-411, the free (ad-supported) directory assistance service launched by Google, it discusses the option for users to enter a business name or category by using the cell phone keypad. The exact prompt, after you call 1-800-GOOG-411 and utter a city and state and press 1, is:

To spell the business name or category using your keypad just enter one number for each letter. For example, to spell Taxi, you'd enter 8-2-9-4 and just leave out spaces and punctuation.

Folks, this is no normal text messaging. This is the world of wordnumbers. Google wants you to ' spell with keypad ' by pressing each key just once. Press the number equivalent of each letter you want to spell with and, tada! Google uses on its web cheatsheet the example of 'TOYS would be 8697.' In this case, the 8697 is the wordnumber for Toys. The actual domain 8697.com would be the dot com wordnumber.

So what's the big whoop? Firstly, Google is actively using its Google Number Search (GNS) technology in an active application (finally). Google Number Search was a mobile search experiment that enabled users to search the internet using wordnumbers. Google shut down GNS in 2000 after poor uptake of the technology but has kept the domain, 466453.com, which was the dedicated domain for GNS searching. GNS is what interprets numeric strings entered in the GOOG411 application into words that it matches against yellow pages directories. Google has for long maintained quasi-inactive applications of GNS, for instance the operators ALLNUM and NUM, which work in all Google search products - Jamptap was the first to report on the existence of those operators.

Secondly, Google is using an updated GNS lexicon for GOOG-411. The NUM and ALLNUM operators are still linked to a lexicon of common words, company names, etc.. that hasn't been updated since 2000 (i.e., the wordnumber for Cingular doesn't work with NUM or ALLNUM).


The real truth - so we think - is that Google is planning on relaunching its Google Number Search system. This ' spell with keypad ' mention is a rare one for Google. It indicates a whole lot. It means that Google is ironing out the kinks in its GNS and furthermore testing the waters to see if end users will take up the idea of a wordnumber - entering in numbers as replacements for letters on a mobile phone keypad - for mobile search. If Google sees - based on the data they record, keep and analyze - that users don't mind spelling out search entries with numeric tapping, then there is no reason to believe that Google won't start prodding mobile search users to do the same thing. That is where the revolution will happen since mobile search could one day capture a market many times larger than the PC search market and the advertising revenue potential is unthinkably large. The problem has been the fact that texting on mobile phones is very cumbersome. Google holds the key to solve that mobile search problem. It lies in three simple words: spell with keypad.

In case you may be wondering, the dotcom wordnumber for Toys is taken by Worddial.com

466453 now has a logo!

I found this logo that some talented person posted on their blog:

HERE

What is the significance of 466453? Each digit corresponds respectively to letters in the word 'Google' on your cell phone keypad. When entering the url 466453.com on your cell phone, it goes to Google.com. That saves you a bunch of multi-tapping.

Google apparently isn't ready to share this knowledge far and wide since it is still pointing mobile users towards a version of the traditional url (google.com).

Worddial's 732724.com (SEARCH) page gets cleaned up

WordDial has just cleaned up its 732724.com portal, perhaps one of its most visited portals (92466.com, the dot com wordnumber to YAHOO, resolves to it). Before this weekend, the three top slots were all reserved for different Google mobile urls, but now there's just one Google mobile address.

What's more interesting is the differences in the URLs (and the TLDs) of the links.
The link to Google is 'www.google.com'
The link to Yahoo is 'yahoo.mobi'
The link to Live search is 'mobile.live.com/Search'
The top search engine companies are more-or-less promoting different URLs than those listed above. On Google's site, users are encouraged to visit 'mobile.google.com,' however on a different part of the site Google promotes the shorter url: 'google.com'. On Yahoo's site, it encourages using 'm.yahoo.com'. Live is, however, the only consistent one; on mobile.search.live.com it lists 'mobile.live.com/search' as the mobile url.

A shortcut to Google on your mobile is 466453.com.

Wordnumbers and the electric car: good ideas never die

As we reported in March, a small part of Yahoo's emerging strategy to become the number one mobile search engine was an aggressive foray into the numeric domain name arena. In March, Yahoo struck a partnership deal with WordDial, a New Zealand company that owns hundreds of thousands of numeric domain names including Yahoo's wordnumber, which is 92466.com. (The wordnumber concept is one that never fully took off. The credit for its origin might go to Google, Inc., which owns their .com wordnumber - 466453.com - and actually put it into use back in 2001 when their Google Number Search free service was live for several months. Since 2001, every now and then a blogger resurrects the same old question - 'Why does Google own 466453.com' - and eventually learns anew the basic concept of the wordnumber and some of its practical benefits to the mobile search experience.)

Although Google hasn't profited in any measurable terms by owning 466453.com (466453.com had an Alexa ranking of 4,181,472 in October 2006), which Google simply forwards to its main search page, there still exists a very real possibility that wordnumbers could be winning tickets in the near future. As cell phone manufacturers begin to build in hot-keys (that can be programmed to add '.com' to a URL entry) or even add '.com' buttons to keypads, users will eventually realize that multi-tapping to spell out words on a mobile phone keypad will be a waste of their time and energy.

In March, Yahoo wanted to get in on the action and we suspect paid a premium price to get WordDial to activate 92466.com and resolve it to one of WordDial's premiere portals at 732724.com, which is the .com wordnumber for SEARCH. Back in March, Yahoo was the number one listing at 732724.com. We noticed this week that Yahoo's placement has fallen. It has not only fallen below three distinct Google mobile search links, but also the link to Live Search for Mobile.

The likely explanation for this change is statistics. There couldn't have been more than a thousand or two unique visitors in a one-month period to 92466.com. And when Yahoo execs scoffed at the poor stats, they probably decided it wasn't worth the money to be number one at WordDial's premiere portal. Yahoo hasn't given up; they still are listed on WordDial's SEARCH portal - at number five - and also listed on the nearly 10 other WordDial portals as we mentioned our March 31 post.

So, who's at fault for the lackluster experience of the 'wordnumber.' It is the same old argument: will a concept evolve into a trend because users demand it (i.e., demand an easier way to enter mobile searches) or because providers market the concept. Certainly, none of the three big search companies have done anything to market the idea of the wordnumber. A simple google or blog search will reveal that the only marketing over the past year or two of Yahoo's and Google's .com wordnumber has been us, Jamptap. So, then, why does Yahoo and Google, and other internet companies, bother to retain their partnership agreements with WordDial? Our best guess is that they want to penetrate the New Zealand mobile market and WordDial is one of the best places to do that.

What it all comes down to is marketing. Who wants a brand name - which in the case of Google or Yahoo accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars or more as Goodwill on the balance sheet - to suddenly be synonymous with a string of numbers? It's a daring move to associate a nearly billion dollar asset to a string of un-trademarkable numbers. However, Porsche, Disney and Levi's (jeans), among other companies, have accomplished this association without peril to their profits. The idea probably makes Yahoo and Google execs jittery for the above reason and also the likelihood that users will be easily confused by the association of a brand name like Yahoo to a string of numbers. But that is becoming less and less the case ever since those companies began marketing their SMS codes, 92466 and 466453, respectively. Note that Google's shortcode was 46645 for many years before Google recently changed it to 466453.

As Google and Yahoo plan to roll out a slew of new mobile products over the next few years, it is inevitable that efficiency of the wordnumber concept will prevail. Speaking of efficiency, who knew back in the early 1900s - after the energy-efficient electric car idea was killed - that in 2007 we would all be hyped about electric (or hybrid) vehicles? Good ideas, they never die.

92466.com vs. 466453.com

The big news here on Jamptap, which has had a lame existence over the past year for no other reason than the big Internet companies have lacked the courage and ingenuity to try something new, is that Yahoo has apparently signed a lease with Worddial for 92466.com. WordDial bought 92466.com before Yahoo could. And this apparently pissed Yahoo off (when they found out) because Yahoo proceeded to buy every 92466 in every TLD around the world. When you typed in 92466.com on your mobile browser until this week, you were forwarded to the SEARCH (732724.com) page of WordDial, which provided links to Google, Motionbridge, Live search and others, but not Yahoo.

WordDial was smart. And Yahoo was holding out, but in the end knew that WordDial would never sell 92466.com to them. WordDial is a company based in New Zealand that owns over 1 million numeric domain names (dot coms) and has been developing a simple technology to allow easy access to information on the web using just the numbers on your phone keypad. They have little intention - although I can't be sure of this - of selling, since their business model is about 'content partnership,' which is a fancy term for charging fees to be included in a mobile directory listing. So...when I checked today, just days after the launch of Yahoo's new mobile search application, 'OneSearch,' there was one new link on the top of the list at 732724.com: Yahoo.

Brilliant. Yahoo knew that it needed to survive by at least matching Google at its mobile services, even if that meant paying whichever asking price for a content partnership agreement with WordDial.

So, where are the headlines? There aren't any and probably won't be any. This whole numeric domain thing has never had much success, yet. Google tried it in 2001 with their Google Number Search. Google's GNS was not used very much and so Google stopped updating a crucial part of their servers that link to GNS searches, which can still be performed if you type a series of numbers after allnum: or num: in Google. But Yahoo knows the wave of the future. Yahoo will never be a downloadable application that is menu-driven. Yahoo will always require the user to type in Yahoo in their browser. When it comes to cell phones, key-pad input is a big deal. It is cumbersome. But it is very easy to switch to number-mode and start pressing numbers, instead of multi-tapping to type out letters in a domain name. Thus, while Yahoo(.com) is 11 keypad taps, 92466(.com) is 5 presses. 466453.com is a 'savings' of 7 taps over Google.com. If you think of the millions of mobile users that will be accessing Google and Yahoo each day in the near future, they could be cutting their key pad entries in half using the numeric domains 466453.com, and 92466.com. A search engine that doesn't follow suit could lose customers for no other reason than it would take users an extra 5 or 6 keypad presses to get to that search engine's homepage.

So, the fight in the ring between Yahoo and Google is more vigorous than even it appears in the presses. Will both companies begin to advertise these numeric domain portals? Will other internet companies follow suit? Will domain speculators start buying up numeric domain names?

Google's trial and error mobile strategy

 

Finally, an article that discusses Google and the future of its mobile strategy.

 

The article states: "Undoubtedly, Google would demur from describing its strategic planning process as 'trial and error'. " 

 

http://www.mobileentertainmentvision.com/default.asp?page=article&targetUrl=http://admin.telecoms.com/marlin/20001002441/ARTICLE/mp_articleid/20017362345/mp_pubcode/me_comment

{link no longer works try http://mobile14.com/?p=1783}

 

Google not only has the large user base, assets and so on, but it has Google Number Search. 

Google put GNS on the shelf after realizing that droves of users weren't using it.  Although GNS has accumulated a lot of dust, it is actually ready to launch in a moment's notice.  Google just needs to update the GNS lexicon, which includes search terms that were around in the year 2001.  That'll take about a second or two to fix.  Although I think that GNS was an 'error' in Google Inc's 'trial and error' mobile strategy, it will be a big hit one day.  

 

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.