Conference notes from the "Meet the Mobile Search Engines" session at Search Engine Strategies New York '07

Speakers:
Paul Yiu - Yahoo!
Matthew Snyder - Nokia
Matt Tengler - JumpTap
Matt Ward-Steinman - Medio

[L-R] Matthew Snyder (Nokia), Paul Yiu (Yahoo!), Matt Tengler (JumpTap), Matt Ward-Steinman (Medio)

Paul Yiu - Yahoo!

The search experience really is a hideous experience but they're working hard to make it better. People want direct answers, not just links - OneSearch is Yahoo!'s solution (m.yahoo.com on cellular devices).

Use short, concise titles
Validate your site
There's a separate mobile crawler, so be careful with robots.txt

From desktop - mobile.yahoo.com for more info for publishers.

Y! also has programs for mobile advertisers.

Matthew Snyder - Nokia

Localized advertising - cell providers always know location of user and can give contextual ads. Starbucks launched search which allows users to find closest store.

50% now full web capable, not just WAP.

1/2 of the ads are in mobile apps - not normal search

Structured data and answers (not just text search) is the leading edge - the most difficult to implement.

Nokia is pushing CPA (including pay-per-call, pay-per-coupon) advertising vs. CPM or CPC...

There are so many ad platforms it's really confusing which to use for publishers - Nokia has the Ad Connector to help publishers navigate the landscape.

Matt Tengler - JumpTap

Company takes white label approach to search and advertising - 10 operators, 120 million subscribers.

Structured and unstructured search - they have their own crawler and search interface.

It's important to leverage the capabilities - such as location and knowing the abilities of the particular device.

The carriers primary business is voice, not data and the data plans are complicated which inhibits usage.

The types of queries are becoming more and more diverse - not just ring tones any more.

They have a suite of tools that works with AT&T/Cingular developer tools (and will soon release their own JumpTap branded version) - everything from checking ranking to checking validity and device emulation - developer.cingular.com

They detect handset and give back different results so the experience is as good as possible.

Submit your content to JumpTap includng XML feeds.

Matt Ward-Steinman - Medio

Carriers don't want to piss off customers with ads - the revenue isn't nearly as important as the monthly fees they get.

They use highly targeted demographics to deliver ads and search results (including past behavior) to deliver different search results. Also put people into groups to fill in what they don't know about them.

The carrier is in much greater control than ISPs on wireline web. In-house promotions, screen layout, look and feel and even search rankings.

4 carriers cover 85% of the market and cross-carrier advertising.

Mobile searches are about 4% of the amount of regular search.

There's a market need for someone to insulate advertisers from all the advertising platforms.

Q&A

Y! - don't need a .mobi domain - just handle your headers properly. Do link them if you have both. If you don't link, the results can be unpredictable.
JT - .mobi is just another TLD - the content's generally better for mobile but it's not necessary.

Y! puts most relevant content first, but trust is part of it and they trust their own content quite a bit. Yet, you can do well if you give them feeds, but the question is how well you'll do if you compete with Y! content.

The small carriers like boost or Amp'd are friendlier to off-deck content providers.

Tags: JumpTap, Mobile, SES-NY, Yahoo!
Categories: Mobile Browsers, Search Engines