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Eye opening chat on federated mobile search with Phyllis Reuther CTO of MCN Mobile Content Networks

by: admin Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Rating: it’s the UI!

In December, I wrote an article called Medio vs MCN on Federated Mobile Search. I wrote this as Medio has announced a new federated arm to the business and MCN has a pure federated solution.

Comments I got back from the article,
“I liked it”
“Well done”
“So fair, that no one is happy with it”

MCN’s CTO Phyllis Reuther then contacted me for a briefing. She felt that the MCN platform is miles better than Medio’s and wanted to tell me her thoughts on why.

We had a very interesting 30 minutes where Phyllis went into detail about indexing vs federated. A lot of this I know already, but Phyllis wanted to make the following point to contra my argument.

She said that the MCN federated platform can hook into ANY content provider to give instant results. The search was universal in that it would dig down to the query level and my remarks on “having to click the federated search term” were wrong as that was just the user interface.

I will type up the interview for the Mobile Search Analyst –but that was interesting and something new for me. I honestly thought that federated search needed to narrow down the query at the input point to guarantee results. But this is not the case. The list of search terms in the results page (local, content etc), according to Phyllis is just the user interface (set by the mobile operator).