(via AOL IM)
Russell Beattie - on Web to Mobile search:
I think from what I've seen so far, most people have looked at mobile search as a way of finding the stuff "out there" from my phone, a.k.a. "anywhere".
That's true, except for RSS to mobile where preferences define the "search" results, see RSS news a testbed for mobile search.
Why do I have to bother to upload my camera phone pictures to Flickr, for example, in order for them to be found? If my phone has 24/7 connectivity and hundreds of megabytes of storage (and getting bigger every day) then why can't I serve up content from there? says Beattie.
Here's his idea: ... a real index page, like index.xml where you could give the search engines summaries of your content ...and your phone pinged the search engines with its list of content every once in a while instead.
Indexing the phone content isn't hard, its already in the market by QIX.
Imagine if we applied a message queue system to search.
Your phone regularly uploads a small index file of the contents on your mobile [to a mobile content repository], then searches are applied against that, not the original data.
Then if a match is found, a request is sent back to the phone asking for the file to be uploaded as soon as possible.
A message goes off to the mobile repository that says something like, "Hey, remember that item you said you had available? I'd like a copy of it. Now would be preferable, but if you want you can wait until the next time you have a chance. Thanks."
What could be done with the kind of feature?
Imagine this, says Russell: If I can tell your phone that I want a piece of info dynamically, there's no reason I couldn't add a bit of security on top and then "check it out", right?
So, I want to listen to the latest Brittany Spears song. I don't have a copy of it, but my friend does. Now, it'd be illegal for me to copy it off his phone since we could conceivably listen to it at the same time then.
But what if I wanted to just "check it out" (like from a library) for just that amount of time. Would that be illegal?
Now imagine if this was world wide? I can check out my songs to anyone, one person at a time, on a global scale... all accessed via a simple web search.
It's a clever idea. Tom Hume doesn't necessarily agree:
But I'm not sure I agree - look at what Qix is managing to do right now, without any server-side indexing. As handsets get more and more powerful, this is something that really belongs on the device.
But isn't one solution [Beattie's] assisting search and sharing of mobile content, and the other [Hume/Qix] supporting a stand-alone handset search? They seem to be very complementary and also synergistic in that Qix-like solutions serve both objectives, with the Beattie proposal offering advantages over a handset-only index.
Tom Hume discusses search options for handsets in The Feature.
Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!
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