Friday, March 04, 2005

Listen Up Search Engines

From eWeek.com Search engines look beyond the Web.

NEW YORK—The major search engines are looking beyond the Web to find, display and make money from search results.

At the Search Engines Strategies 2005 Conference & Expo here this week, search-engine executives offered a peek into a future wherein general search will increasingly tap sources outside the Web and in which users will access search from mobile devices and emerging applications.

"If we were able to take search forward five years, you can then answer, discover, recall and publish information anywhere, anytime," said Oshoma Momoh, general manager of Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Search, during a panel discussion. "Search begins to fade in the background a little bit, [and] search becomes a bit more of an ingredient rather than something that's front and center."

I think it's more navigational than searching. More interaction than passivity.

Executives from such search leaders as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. sounded a similar tune, noting such trends as search moving "outside the paradigm of the box."

Do they mean those coveted four square inches that will be the most valuable real estate for advertising?

"Smart answers is the right way to deliver information for a mobile phone [because] a user does not want to click links or wait for page to download," Lanzone said.

What a revelation. People don't want to type 21 letters just to get to Amazon's webpage? What if they could just type AMAZON.

All search engines, THIS is how you go mobile.

No comments: