Social-assisted search - a new direction for mobile search? Steve Ives Oct 2007.

Social-assisted search -

a new direction for mobile search?

Steve Ives Oct 2007

Slide 2

Taptu - 8 key facts

Founded: September 2005

Expertise: search algorithms + mobile user experience

Team: 27 at Science Park, Cambridge, UK

Service launch: across Europe and America from October 2007

Innovation: 12 key patent applications filed in mobile search

Passion: creating a simpler, faster, more reliable mobile search

Existing Teams: Development (10), Content research (7), Mktg (3) User experience (2)

Investors: Sofinnova and 3i initial round in December 2006

Founders: Steve Ives, Stef Butlin, Bob Last (ex Trigenix, Qualcomm)

Slide 3

New mobile ecosystem

More bandwidth: EDGE, HSDPA, WiFi phones, WiMax

More processing power & memory: enabling big improvements in user interfaces (iPhone)

Increasing off-portal mobile internet traffic(10-20% in US, 40-60% in W. Eur)

More mobile-friendly Web content (5.7m dotMobi and WAP pages, up from 2m over 12 months)

Slide 4

Implications

Mobile browsing will take off, especially off-portal

Clusters of devices emerging:laptops (0.8-1.2MP), HiPhones, (160-300KP), MidPhones (80KP) , LoPhones (<40KP)

As content broadens, search becomes the de-facto interface to all mobile content

But mobile search must work well across all device clusters

Slide 5

Reality check: mobile search today

Sources: Nielsen Netratings May 2007, M:Metrics Feb 2007, Pew Internet May 2005

Desktop internet: 490bn searches pa

Mobile internet: 3.1bn searches pa

Small screen issues- need for brevity- 10 taps or under

Mobile network issues- network latency- inspection of results- data charges

Relevancy issues- desktop Webcontent often not mobile-friendly

Slide 6

The Smyth & Cotter experiment

5 10 15 20 50

100

80

60

40

20

0

% users

Number of clicks + scrolls

12

Smyth + Cotter Springer Verlag 2002

Click-distance model of mobile navigation

Mobile Search Engine 1 (36)

Slide 7

Lateral thinking needed

Slide 8

The Long Tail

10 10000Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, Oct 2004

90%

10%

Sexy

Britney

Pamela Anderson

1,000X

Social Web+ user-generated content

Slide 9

Social metrics

Slide 10

Social graph

Slide 11

Taptu architecture

Purifiers

extensible for new types

searches

results

Wiki Music Travel Film/TV News

Indexes,ranking& metrics

CSOs

Web feeds

query server

Device info User history PagePack

Trustedsources:

WikipediaOther wikis MyspaceTripadvisorIMDBetc+Mobile Web

Other

Knowledgebase

Location

Slide 12

Click-distance analysis

5 10 15 20 50

100

80

60

40

20

0

% users

Number of clicks + scrolls

12

Smyth + Cotter Springer Verlag 2002

Social-assisted(music, fact-finding)

Conventional

Slide 13

Summary

Mobile content growing fast, as is mobile browsing

Realization that search is the de-facto interface to the online world, as content increases

Mobile search needs to work better - usability gap

Social-assisted mobile search can drastically improve usability – 30 clicks down to 8

Now we need to extend to all the other categories, from 25 items to 1 billion items

Slide 14

starting with music & fact-finding:

www.taptu.comhttp://taptu.mobi