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Reporting from ITU 2006 in Hong Kong Silicon.com's Telecom's columnist Jo Best reported on a Google representative talking on mobile search.
The favourite phone search term is a mirror of its internet equivalent apparently - people are looking for sex. One of the other favourites though is very mobile specific - ringtones. There could yet be hope for the content market, it seems. He warns though operators have to pull their socks up - most content is 12 clicks away from the user, apparently. Ten or 11 clicks too far, you might suggest.
That's a lot of clicks, and one reason that Sol Trujillo the imported CEO of Telstra Australia drove a mantra of "one click" as they designed their 3G HSPDA mobile phone menu experience. Insiders said that if you didn't show the one-click slide right up front when presenting new ideas or content then the presentation stopped right there!
It's a good design idea - but in life everything can't be one click - after all Japan's DoCoMo has 10,000 official sites linked through its i-mode system, and more than 100,000 "unofficial" sites e.g. linked through URLs and into the web, and no endorsement from DoCoMo. They can't all be "one click" from the top menu!
But if Google can cut the clicks in half or more then that's progress. Google is also actively working on moving away from clicks altogether - to voice search on mobile. Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, spoke at ITU of voice not for search but for simply voice activation for large numbers of illiterate users in emerging markets.
Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!
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