Mobile Search: Yahoo! oneSearch launches
If you’ve been following the news from CES 2007, you may have heard about the new Yahoo! mobile search on Yahoo! Go 2.0. What’s so new about mobile search, you might ask? I’m here to break it down for you.
First things first. The new search is called “oneSearch” and its so named because we’ve taken a radically different tack toward returning and displaying results on mobile devices, while leveraging a common search technology platform. The mobile device has very different requirements. With limited bandwidth, screen size and time, this service puts information all right in front of you without having to click on multiple links and then find your way back through a convoluted navigation process, as you might have to do on a more conventional mobile search service. Have a look at this example search for “49ers”.
With one search from your mobile device, you can now easily get to a wide variety of 49ers results ‘ scores, team web sites, photos, news articles, and more.
Our goal with this release is to provide a rich set of relevant content for a given query from a number of different categories of results. The new display therefore demonstrates significant vertical integration on the mobile search result page to bring back more direct results. We’re already doing this on the web search results pages. For example, you see a shortcut for news or images in addition to web results where it is likely you would be interested in seeing those items.
In addition to providing relevant links to web and mobile web sites, the new mobile search provides immediate answers for business listings, movies, sports, news, events, celebrity gossip, stock/finance information, and so on, all from a single search. If the query term is “ipod”, the top of the result page includes results from Yahoo! Shopping, with prices and reviews, which could help the user who’s considering a purchase. A search for “San Francisco” will return weather, traffic information, and local news.
In a way, we have merged all the tabs above the search box and do our best to determine the most relevant pieces of information without asking the user to pick a specific vertical.
To get the new mobile search, you’ll need to download Yahoo! Go for your phone. We would love to hear what you think of the new service, so please drop us a comment below!
Thanks!
Paul Yiu, Yahoo! Search
PS. Opera has also selected Yahoo! Search as the exclusive search for its millions of Web browsers for mobile phones, Opera Mini’ and Opera Mobile worldwide.
Hi!
I think Yahoo! Go 2.0 is great…
but where are Yahoo Go for PC??
I think you guys are doing a great job with this new search. Plus the support of Opera should help to boost users pretty quickly.
Thank You
Luis,
I am the Product Manager for Go Desktop. While I can’t say when it will be released, I can say that our colleagues in Mobile have set a very high bar that we plan to live up to.
Hi You guys did a great job for Yahoo Go 1.0. I have it on my Nokia N70. But how do I upgrade it to 2.0?
Soo,
I don’t believe there are any plans to provide an automatic upgrade from v1.0 to v2.0. So, you will have to manually uninstall 1.0 and then get 2.0 from http://mobile.yahoo.com/go. However, check out the product tour and beta availability before you uninstall 1.0. 2.0 has much more limited integration with the native S60 clients than 1.0. So, make sure that’s what you want.
Edward and Ajit,
The team is working to support as many phones and OS’s as possible. But, we had to start somewhere. So, we worked closely with 4 select partners (Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, and RIM) to deliver a great experience for 73 phones right out of the gate. We will continue to expand the number of phones supported (heck, it’s only just in beta right now), but we want to make sure everything works perfectly on a given phone before we officially support it. Keep watching http://mobile.yahoo.com/go/phones?oem=list for the latest info.
It is not clear if you are still supporting the syncing to the Yahoo Calendar to the phone in version 2.0 or not.
And what about supporting syncing of Notes?
I’m very happy about the Yahoo! / Opera partnership, though there are many people that aren’t.
I hope you actually proove to these people that you can do a good job with the search. I also hope that you don’t proove people right.
Remember that whilst it can sometimes be useful, especially to yourselves, users don’t always want to see all their content originating from Yahoo!-based websites. ;)
FAO JONATHAN STRAUSS
I imagine this to be a stupid question, but I don’t suppose there’s any word on Mac or Linux versions of Yahoo! Go for Desktop?
I know Yahoo! tends not to see it in it’s own interest to support these platforms, but I’d like to see some one day. (Y!IM probably has the best support, but even that is well dated now – especially the UK versions)
is Yahoo! Go 2.0 available in other countries like the philippines?
Good work!!
I really liked the S60 integration features you get with Yahoo go 1.0. Does any one know where I can download it? When will 2.0 come out of beta and have those features included?
Great job on this feature!
Automatic upgrading would be wonderful
nice work!
S60 intergration is cool!
This is so cool!!!
“Hi!
I think Yahoo! Go 2.0 is great.
but where are Yahoo Go for PC?”
i don’t know Luis :(
thanks u very much
This is great especially when I want just the news and headlines for the Patriots. I dont have to search through all football news. Again, Yahoo! is making life more easier!