source( Gary Price’s blog at Search Engine Watch)
AOL just announced a search service(beta version) for PDA users. Gary Price pointed out some of its interesting features:

• A new mobile web search tool (beta) that will automatically optimizes non-mobile friendly pages for mobile phones and devices. Google and Yahoo also offer this feature. AOL’s "transcoding" technology comes from InfoGin, an Israeli company.
• The new AOL Mobile Search site also allows the user to access the AOL PinPoint Shopping and AOL Yellow Pages.
• Even if you don’t have mobile web access, you can view the site on a regular browser here and see a mobile search results page
• I ran a mobile "web" search for "Search Engine Watch" and spotted paid listings at the top of each results page (Results page one has paid listings, results page two shows paid listings and so on) Presently, neither Yahoo nor Google show paid listings on mobile search results pages.

AOL web search also identifies different sections in a web page. When I ran into the first result “http://www.umbc.edu/~finin/” using keyword “finin”, Tim’s photo was displayed at the very beginning, and the navigation bar has been detected and put on the second page. This beta version still has some limitations, e.g. it does not support JavaScript very well. Below is a table that compares three mobile search providers.

	Yahoo	Google	AOL search
web search (WAP)	local, image, web	local, image, web, mobile-web	web, AOL services
SMS (text messaging)	local, weather, stock, dictionary, area code …	local, weather, stock, glossary, area code, movies, Q/A, phone book, driving direction, Froogle	N/A
online demo	WAP,   SMS	SMS	WEB

Related posts: • Technorati Mobile launched;  • MobiQuitous 2005;  • W3C launches mobile web inititive;  

Posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 3:56 pm in categories [Mobile Computing, Web]. Comments feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site. edit