DD:THE INTERNET IN HAND
The Cellphone's Potential as a Search Tool Gets Tapped
By LISA GUERNSEY
May 4, 2005
FEW months ago, a group of friends in Austin, Tex., were dining out when the talk turned to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. Someone asked, When does the first round start? No one knew.
So Mohit Goyal, a business analyst with a software company, opened his phone and typed in a few keywords. Mr. Goyal found the answer in seconds, and the group made plans to get together for the first-round game. "I love the fact that no matter where I am, I can get this information," he said.
Mr. Goyal is an early adopter of technology, and his experience is most likely to sound too good to be true to most cellular users. But he was not using an extraordinarily high-tech phone. He was simply adept at using the features on his Nokia 6820.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo are betting that most consumers will catch on to what Mr. Goyal has already figured out - that mobile phones can search the Web when a computer is not nearby.
In the last six months, the potential of mobile search has been promoted in a flurry of news releases. Yahoo announced local and image search services intended for phone screens. Google, which has been offering a mobile Internet search service for several years, now takes questions via another channel of communication, the short-message system SMS. Fast Search and Transfer, a search company that powers enterprises like Lexis-Nexis and IBM.com, created a service called FAST mSearch for use by cellphone carriers and content providers.
Still, searching the Web on a phone is frustrating for most users. Screens are tiny. Waiting for a page to appear can take 10 seconds or more. And when signals fade, the lag times can be unbearable.
"The experience is much like text browsing in the early days of the Internet," said Allen Tsai, founder of Mobiledia.com, a site for comparison shopping of cellphones.
Only 1 to 2 percent of Web-enabled phones are used for anything more than voice calls and text messaging, said Paul Budde, founder of BuddeComm, an Australian researcher of telecommunications issues.
But just as the Internet went mainstream as broadband became more widely available, the mobile Internet will become popular as bandwidth increases, search-engine companies say. With those improvements, they add, payment plans will need to provide incentives for searching.
"If you are charged 10 cents a minute, you're not going to care to find the answer to a 'Seinfeld' episode you are talking about at dinner," said Chris Winfield, president and co-founder of 10e20, a search-engine marketing firm. "But if it's free and fast, you're going to use it."
Mobile operators are already creating faster networks, motivated by the prospect of customers downloading movies and music. Hardware and software makers are tweaking their products to speed delivery.
Technology that recodes Web pages for display on a cellphone is also advancing. "Most Web pages are not written for cellphones; they are written for a computer screen," said Georges Harik, a director of mobile search at Google. "This is a chicken and egg problem that is going to go away," he added, as soon as Web developers realize "there are 1.2 billion phones out there that can connect to information."
But "when you go out to dinner with friends, do you take your laptop with you?" asks Susan Aldrich, a senior vice president with the Patricia Seybold Group, a consulting and research company. Searching with a phone may be "in the early stages," she said, "but I think it is going to explode."
Your Phone Can Do It
No matter what kind of phone you have - short of those made more than five years ago - you can search the Web. Here's how:
Just a Plain Phone? Here's a Solution Almost all cellphones made in the last few years can exchange short text messages via SMS. By using that messaging system, you can ask search engines to deliver bits of information to your phone.
Google's SMS search service, for example, enables anyone to send a query to its search engine. Want to know the weather in Atlanta? Go to the SMS feature on your phone and use your number keypad to tap in the words "weather Atlanta." Send the message to phone number 46645, or GOOGL on most phones. Within seconds, a three-day forecast appears.
Other providers of SMS search include Synfonic (650-430-7183), 4Info Mobile Search (4-INFO) and Smarter.com (610-SMARTER), which uses a product name or part number to search for its lowest available price online. Just be aware that your carrier may charge a few cents for each message you send unless you have signed up for a monthly flat fee for messaging.
Phones bought in the last year or so Many of these phones already come with small browsers that can show you limited sections on the Internet. Yahoo, for example, translates all pages from its local-search database, including full-color maps and user reviews, for display on phones.
Google has multiple mobile-search services, including Froogle, which helps you comparison shop. Answers.com (go to mobile.answers.com on your phone) delivers word definitions and information on famous people and places.
Or do you have a smart phone? Smart-phone users are the early adopters who pay hundreds of dollars for hand-held devices with color screens and heaps of features, like cameras and e-mail access. Think the Treo, the Web-browsable Blackberry, the Sidekick and others.
If you have one of these phones, you can search the entire Web from your phone by clicking to the Web. Many smart phones are preset with search engines. But most Web pages were not designed for viewing on a phone, so they may be hard to decipher.
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