Ramping Up Mobile Search

Companies up and down the mobile search value chain “regard the next year as a ramp-up period and are moving full steam ahead on a raft of soon-to-be-announced search and discovery services”.
This is becoming the next battlefield for consumer loyalty and conciousness in the mobile arena (after the handset manufacturers vs carriers). “The search-engine companies’ aggressive moves to own the end-user relationship are becoming a major concern to operators, which fear that their relationship with the user could change for the worse. Users could – and increasingly are – changing the default setting from the mobile operator portal to point to a search-engine home page.” The operators fear becoming a “mere bit-pipe”, although a significant portion of industry pundits thinks becoming that pipe is the best thing for the carriers.
There’s a lot of ways of monetizing mobile search, and they’re listed in the article, but recommendation engines are also mentioned, which have the advantage over search in that people would be able to discover content they may be interested in but were unaware of. Either way, “operators should abandon the notion that they know best in terms of “what’s hot and what’s not.” Picking good content is not the operators’ core competence – and a hit-driven approach is no longer a viable way to market content.”

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