The search continues for the right technology recipe for mobile search.
Increasingly, voice seems like a logical ingredient.

Today’s feature phones and smartphones do far more than telephony pioneers of the 1800s could imagine. But the future of mobile search may rely on old-fashioned spoken words for its input and output – with a mountain of data processing in the middle.

Mobile search in the early 2000s faces many challenges in the field of human-computer interaction. Pick up any two handsets and you’ll find wildly different screen sizes and touch abilities, partial or full keyboards, 2G or 3G data connection speeds, primitive or sophisticated Web browsers. So the most accurate and predictable way to conduct mobile search is through the lowest common denominator.

“We talk to that damn thing,” IAG Research’s Roger Entner bluntly summarizes. “Pushing buttons on that phone is about the most awkward thing you can think of.”

Microsoft and Google are aware that opinions like Entner’s represent common end users. That’s why both companies are feverishly rolling out voice-search interface strategies.

“One of the huge growth areas is in mobile search, and voice is really going to be the natural way to use a phone with mobile search,” says Microsoft’s Robbie Bach, president, Entertainment and Devices division.

To help, Microsoft acquired TellMe Networks last summer. The Mountain View, Calif., subsidiary is known for its speech recognition technology used by enterprises such as American Airlines for taking reservations, by FedEx for customer service, and by AT&T and Verizon for directory assistance calls.

Hearing Voices
Roger Entner: Pushing buttons for search is backward.	Robbie Bach: Voice is the natural way to use search.	Jason Burby: Mobile search changes everything.

Voice-search features developed by TellMe such as directory assistance, local weather and movie times are now part of Microsoft Live Search. Currently that is accessible by dialing Microsoft’s 800-CALL-411 or by downloading the free Live Search for Windows Mobile program. It’s also expected to be part of the latest Windows Mobile 6.1 release, according to published reviews of leaked 6.1 phones.

TellMe officials note that additional insight into the Live Search for Windows Mobile roadmap can be learned by dialing 800-555-TELL, which is TellMe’s own free service and includes a wider vocabulary and more search topics than Live Search offers, or by downloading trial programs at beta.tellme.com. TellMe also has an enterprise development program at studio.tellme.com. It can be used by anyone, but eventually TellMe hopes to see contributions from Microsoft and third-party developers.

GETTING IT RIGHT
Google has a similar local search tool at 800-GOOG-411, but directory assistance is all it does for now. Unlike Microsoft, which has a deep-seated reputation for big promises followed by unrefined products, Google is determined to get its full mobile search product right the first time.

“Can we move from just being able to search for businesses in a particular area to a full-fledged Google search? That’s a very big leap. The reason it’s difficult is because you’re moving from a restricted dictionary ... to a complete human interaction. We have our own voice engineering team that’s working on this solution,” says Gummi Hafsteinsson, Google’s senior product manager.

“I would characterize mobile search as a difference of degree and not as a difference of kind. There obviously are contextual clues that are available in mobile that help us discern what a user may be looking for,” such as the user’s location, the time of day, and what kind of device they’re using, product manager Sumit Agarwal adds. “As devices become more sophisticated and as users become more sophisticated, they want it all. They want everything they’d get from the desktop. So it’s been a very, very interesting process for us,” he says.

Agarwal notes that one of the biggest obstacles to desktop-class mobile search is the lack of powerful enough mobile Web browsers. Except for Apple iPhone’s implementation of Safari, mobile browsers today make too many sacrifices by giving users either speed or accurate rendering, but rarely both. Google hopes to fix that in the upcoming Android-based phones by using the same open-source WebKit browser that Apple already uses, he says.

Another technology impediment to desktop-class mobile search is what happens on the backend. Search engines can dream up mobile versions of their tools but the people whose sites get crawled have to do their part, along with the various advertising and portal sites. Such companies increasingly use specialized analytics tools to focus the content they deliver.

Jason Burby, co-chairman of the Web Analytics Association’s standards committee, says the rules change when trying to tailor search results for mobile users and that Web analytics companies and their customers are only just beginning to understand this.

“Mobile is a very small part of what’s out there and most people don’t even get the basics. There are different ways you leverage those tools but it’s all kind of a workaround,” he says.

Officials from Omniture and Coremetrics – the Google and Microsoft of browsing analytics – both generally agree with Burby’s assessment. Both companies say they are creating such workarounds specifically because the current generation of cell phones, for the most part, do not include JavaScript and browser cookies. Without those, desktop analytic tools can only measure mobile searches using Band-Aid technologies.

However, a new generation of startups is emerging that could help. Companies such as Amethon Solutions, of Sydney, Australia; Bango, in Cambridge, England; and Mobilytics, based in Princeton, N.J., are all developing software designed only for mobile analytics.