CloudMagic, the personal search service that indexes your Gmail, documents, contacts, calendar and Twitter updates, is now available as a mobile app. The release follows a major update for the service this past fall, which added the ability to search Twitter and a move to host your personal index in the cloud.
This switch is what enables CloudMagic to work across multiple devices, including now, iPhone and Android smartphones. Using the new mobile app, CloudMagic is surprisingly fast – and far more useful than the phones’ built-in search functions alone. → Read More
How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?
Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom. → Read More
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobile ad exchange Mobclix.
Mobile search is still one of the big unclaimed prizes on the mobile web. Everyone from Google and Yahoo to Apple is going after it, but Microsoft’s Bing may stealthily become the king of the castle by aggressively promoting Bing through mobile apps. Let’s look at each player’s mobile search strategy.
During the Apple keynote in April, Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 4.0, iAd and a few other features even he didn’t seem too excited about. Out of the many mediocre features, Mr. Jobs happened to squeeze in a declaration that, “ On mobile, search hasn’t happened. People aren’t searching on their phones.” During the keynote at WWDC this month, Mr. Jobs declared that iPhone 4 users would have the opportunity to select their search engine from among Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Out of the three, Bing got a special endorsement from Mr. Jobs.
Is Mr. Jobs trying to blindside the other players in this space by making them think he is not concerned about search? I’m sure all of the search traffic he is sending to Google is driving him nuts. Meanwhile, Google has happily—and quite beautifully—optimized their search results page on the iPhone to make it extremely convenient for local searches by incorporating phone numbers, maps and more within the Safari window. → Read More
Bing is on a roll. Yesterday, it released Bing Entertainment and a new iPhone app. And today it is following up with an update to its mobile web search at http://m.bing.com. Bing only recently became a search option on the iPhone, but it really wants to become your default mobile search engine. In fact, if you are not careful, Bing will take over as your default search engine the first time you use it on your iPhone. A message box pops up asking you, “Do you want to change your search engine to Bing?” (Yahoo, the other search options, is using the same notification). Once you do, the hope is there will be no going back.
The new mobile web site looks gorgeous in the iPhone’s mobile web browser (as well as on Androids, Palms, Windows phones, Kins, and Zunes). It looks more like an app, with simplified menu buttons along the bottom (local, maps, directions, movies, weather, favorites) and smooth scrolling in maps. The homepage features Bing’s signature background photo, which looks great on an iPhone screen). And right under the search box, you have the option to “Locate me.” It was able to find my exact street address immediately, something which Google’s mobile web search was having trouble with for me (I had to manually enter my zipcode to get local results). Once you let Bing locate you, it remembers your location on subsequent searches. → Read More
Mobile search could grow from 9 percent of all queries this year to 20 percent by 2012, estimates RBC analyst Ross Sandler in a new report issued today. There is still a huge gap between mobile’s share of overall search queries and its share of search advertising. Sandler estimates that mobile will still represent less than 2 percent of search ad budgets this year, compared to the 9 percent overall share. But he thinks that gap can narrow and that mobile search advertising can be a $2 billion to $3 billion market in 2012.
His assumptions seem a bit aggressive on the ad revenue side. There might always be a gap between mobile search share and mobile search ad spending because of the relative effectiveness of search ads on PCs versus on mobile phones. But Sandler does a deep dive into mobile search advertising and comes up with some compelling reasons why that gap should at the very least begin to narrow just as mobile search starts to take off thanks to the growth of large touchscreen devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. → Read More
Searchme is starting to focus much of its time in the mobile space. Last week, it said it will launch an iPhone app and today it announced that it has launched a visual search engine for mobile devices that can be accessed by surfing to the company’s mobile page.
Searchme’s visual search engine delivers results as a browsable list of “pages,” which are actually images of websites that can be viewed before visiting them. To help users during the search process, Searchme’s search engine suggests categories that have some relevance to the query you’re inputting into the service if you want to drill-down into related topics, and provides shortcuts to the best results to try to cut down on search time. → Read More
Marco Boerries, EVP Yahoo! I just sat in on a Yahoo! press conference here at CTIA and learned a little more about the company’s plans to integrate its “oneSearch 2.0″ features into mobile phones. The three key elements that Yahoo! is emphasizing are an open development platform, easier ways to search, including voice queries, and idle screen search integration. Sounds like a thrill-ride, yes? Buckle up and let’s get things underway. → Read More
