Search your pockets to find that restaurant
For more than a decade, search has
been about the same 10 blue links, but the user base is changing significantly.
We’re marching towards a time when people in all markets will interact with the
Web more frequently through connected devices — phones, tablets, televisions,
consoles and beyond — than they will through personal computers.
The age of the PC as the predominant
way for users to search the Internet will soon be behind us, and in some
markets, it already is. Search is getting ready for the user experience divide
that will be ushered in by the adoption of new devices.
Today, over 1 billion of the world’s
more-than 4 billion mobiles phones are smartphones, and by 2014, mobile
Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop Internet usage. Already, in
2011, more than 50 per cent of all “local” searches were done from a mobile
device. Most of the next billion users coming online in the next decade will
arrive through mobile devices. Most media consumption will be on mobile
devices, and so will most communication, whether spoken or written.
Search is a core part of every
mobile Web user’s experience, same as on desktop. But search on mobile devices
is different from search on the desktop. Mobile searchers have a higher
tendency to search with a local intent and a need for immediate gratification.
Instead of waiting for users to come
to a search results page to enter a query, Internet companies are proactively
fulfilling user content discovery needs by giving them answers for their
queries. Search is evolving fast and in the next three to five years, the
amount of innovation in search is going to be so large that search as a product
will change dramatically.
The recent innovation deployed by a
number of search engines aims to go beyond providing a search box along with
content.
People searching on mobile devices
have a more immediate intent. They use apps as a proxy for search. They look
for the task at hand, and find an app that fits that need. The experience has
become more vertical as people use it for shopping, local services,
restaurants, points of interest, travel, music and so forth, which is quite
different from Web search. It is much more contextual and location-driven.
Apps such as these are adding more
and more smarts to the smartphones. With a few simple clicks, users can
download an app of their choice and then customise their phones for specific
needs such as entertainment, communication, shopping or even business.
Multimedia
too
The mobile search experience is now
integrating mobile multimedia as well. Starting with keyword-based search and
going through the step of voice search, now the end user is offered the
functionality to capture a photo on his cellphone and find related information
on the Internet.
Going forward, more complex searches
and bigger transactions would become viable as technology advances and users
become more comfortable using their mobile devices for searching. And so, there
is ample room for innovation in how you can discover information on mobile
devices.
HARI VASUDEV Vice-president, Connections, Yahoo Inc TH121028
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