mInfo claims that it’s mobile search services use a natural language technology that make it’s search services far faster and easier to use than others. Claims like that would be easy to brush over, except that China Telecom today announced that mInfo is providing it’s Complete Search services for all 80 million of it’s wireless subscribers.
Complete Search will work through several options - SMS query, hosted applications and services pre-loaded on 3G handsets. China Telecom claim the search will return results to natural language queries (like AQA63336 in the UK), as well as directory searches, weather or news results. mInfo has been operating in China for four years now.
From the release:
“mInfo is honored to have been selected by China Telecom to deliver such an important and influential service for its 2G and 3G networks,” said Alvin Wang Graylin, mInfo, CEO. “We are uniquely qualified to execute on the demanding requirements of this new search service and look forward to helping all of China Telecom’s users find the information they need quickly and easily.”
What we think?
mInfo distances itself from keyword searching, and claims that it’s service can understand users requests as full questions. It’s not clear from the release whether the service will return mobile websites in return to queries, but it seems unlikely. To be honest, I’ve gotten some good use out of natural language mobile search services over the past few months. Expanding a service like that to include up-to-date news and weather searches seems like a logical step forward.
Yes, the mInfo/CT solutions provides answers to the questions vs. just potential links. The answers can be provided in one or more SMS messages and could be on pretty much ANY topic area. Any answers the system can’t answer will be responded to by the China Telecom operators right away… and the best part is that it’s a FREE service to all China Telecom subscribers.