Yahoo! Mobile Search Patterns - not quite there yet

by: Bena Roberts Monday, May 19th, 2008

There was a post on BrysonMeunier.com about Yahoo with a link to a paper from Yahoo! on its Mobile Search Patterns called “A Study of Yahoo” Mobile Search Queries”.

Link: http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/fp846-yi.pdf

I read this over the weekend with great interest. For the first time, I missed BKI Media and writing pages of analysis as I think that I could have written a lot on this subject. But a few things really struck me in the analysis.

For example – this is Yahoo’s explanation of oneSearch which it describes as federated.

“Yahoo! oneSearch is a federated search service optimised for mobile devices and users. For a given user query, it, first analyses the concept and the intent of the query. Second it produces and executes a search execution plan, optimised for the concept and intent of the query, against a large array of vertical back-end including the Web, news, images, finance, information, Wikipedia, user generated contents such as Yahoo! Answers and so on. Lastly, it aggregates the search results of the verticals and blends the results in a manner to the query, and to the rendering on the mobile device”.

So why is this important?

Well it seems to be that every mobile search provider has its own version of federated mobile search.

Is this a bad thing?

Well, I am not sure if it’s bad –but it is confusing.

What is the problem?

OK. So, Yahoo! has made mouthful of its explanation above. In simple terms its saying that if federated the result based on the intent of the query. Then the results are contextually displayed from different sources both internal and external.

But what about the Federated?

Well, this is where I get confused.

The original definition of Federated Mobile Search is here:

According to Peter Jacso (2004, Wikipedia) federated search consists of:
1.   Transforming a query and broadcasting it to a group of disparate databases with the appropriate syntax;
2.   Merging the results collected from the databases;
3.   Presenting them in a succinct and unified format with minimal duplications;
4.   Providing a means, performed either automatically or by the portal user, to sort the merged result.

This is what confuses me.

In the document it says that in general most search queries across the board have two words in the them. Then it says that mobile entertainment is the most searched for term across the globe. There are no examples of what a mobile entertainment query is – but the fact that

76% of all US queries and 82% of all international queries are in this area – it must be very broad.
On top of that Music is second in the entertainment sub-category with a huge difference – 12% US queries and 8% International queries.

So. This only tells me that oneSearch doesn’t seem to be able to answer the majority of queries from the entertainment segment and perhaps for entertainment federated mobile search is not the best solution.

On top of that Yahoo! users MCN federated mobile search services in Japan for its music search on Yahoo! Which means that Yahoo! sees music as the future entertainment leader of mobile search – but consumers are searching (and not finding) additional entertainment services.

So in reality – it’s a great honest paper – but the results show inexperience in the mobile search and internet space from consumers. Moreover it enforces the fact that with the mobile internet and oneSearch – we are not quite there yet.