The mobile web version of Yahoo's oneSearch (us.m.yahoo.com/p/search) has launched. In addition to that address which takes you to a dedicated oneSearch page, there is a oneSearch box at the top of Yahoo's US mobile home page at us.m.yahoo.com
Yahoo makes some pretty impressive claims regarding oneSearch. According to Yahoo;
"Finally, mobile search that really works! Introducing Yahoo! oneSearch, an amazingly better search experience that redefines search for the phone. It’s designed to give you instant answers - exactly what you need when you’re on the go. Yahoo! oneSearch understands the type of search you’re doing and optimizes the results accordingly—so you get the answers you need instantly with just one click, right there on the page. oneSearch includes more actual content in your initial results than any other search—all grouped by subject matter and relevance, so there’s no sea of links to wade through like with a PC search. It’s easy to read, scroll through, or drill down further if you want more details.
And, oneSearch gives you results based on where you are. Searching for a movie title will give you local theaters and show times. Type in a city name and oneSearch you will get the latest weather, traffic reports, local news and more."
I thought that sounded pretty good, so I put oneSearch through its paces.
The concept of oneSerarch mostly lives up to it's hype. The idea of puting a
variety of results and of including actual content on the first page returned from a search is a good approach for mobile and is likely to become the standard search design used on mobile sites within a year or two. The idea isn't totally new though, Microsoft's mobile Live Search works similarly. Live gives you links from a variety of search categories; Web, Local, News and the Spaces blog search. But Yahoo goes beyond links to actually include content like scores and weather forecasts. If your looking for a more conventional search experience, each category in oneSearch lets you drill down into a particular type of search with links to "More Mobile Web", "More Flickr Photos", "More businesses", etc.
I also love the fact that Yahoo includes Flickr photos in the results. Classic Yahoo Mobile Image search returns web images which still appear occasionally in oneSearch instead of Flickr pics. Yahoo seems to be saying that the user generated content of Flickr is of better quality than images found crawling the web as a whole. The user generated theme also appears in local results in the form of user
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posted by Dennis Bournique
March 20, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
7 View Comments
