With the introduction this week (overseas, not here in Australia), of the Google Nexus One phone, comes a new incentive for businesses to pay attention to mobile search.

Hailed as the 'next big thing' for two years in a row at least, mobile search seems now, more than ever, to be an inevitability.

When I say mobile search, I mean the ability for people to use a mobile device, like the Nexus One  or iPhone, to browse the internet. Obvious uses for this could be;

•  Price comparing
•  Finding shops/services/restaurants in the area
•  Looking up maps and addresses

However, mobile internet usage has been around for a while now, and it has shown that people are using mobile devices for all kinds of things, including social media like Facebook and Twitter, checking news and researching products. Mobile usage ISN'T a separate market to normal internet usage, it is an expansion of the existing market.

When mobile was in it's infancy, businesses could ignore it. They could say 'our market doesn't use mobile', or 'this isn't a significant opportunity for us'. But now, they can ignore it no longer.

Making your website mobile friendly is almost an essential now. If people can't use your site on their mobile device, then either they will wait until they get to a computer to check your site, or they will use your competitors mobile-friendly site. How patient do you think people are these days?

While writing the post below on Bing, I thought I would check out Google to compare, and saw some wierd results for the term 'hairdresser'. The page appears to be 'sectioned' ;



You can see it has 3 sections;
1. Includes images, a result from the job guides unfortunately titled 'Police Officer', and another occupation entry
2. Includes an expansion of the searched term to 'Hairdresser games' - This left me a bit bewildered, maybe it is a new fad to play hairdressing games?
3. Includes the expected Local business results, Toni and Guy, other 'local' results, and Wikipedia.

To me it seems that the third segment contains the results we are used to. But since Google is always going on about adjusting the algorithm for intent, we might infer that 'recruitment' and 'games' are two of the big new trends in searching online.

If you search for accounting, builders, bakery, SEO, etc, you get the normal results at the moment.

The one thing that keeps me going back to Bing is it's beautiful pictures of places around the world - NOT a great reason to visit a search engine. While checking out todays picture (Harbin! I have been there!) I also thought I would take a quick look at some Bing results and see what was going on.

It seems that Bing loves Wikipedia. Wikipedia is way over represented in their results I think. A search for Sydney brings up 3 entries where Wikipedia is the source information (even though the last one says 'Freebase', the article is from Wikipedia).


Even a search for 'hairdresser' brings up Wikipeda's entry for 'Barber' at number 1. Similarly for 'accountant', but 'builder' has a Wikipedia entry only at number 5. The term 'mobile phone' has Wikipedia at number 2, and the broad and competitive term 'insurance' has Wikipedia at number 1 as well.

I guess the question here is 'intent'.  If you are searching for 'hairdresser', are you looking for a definition? Or would you prefer to use Google, which will give you the name of local hairdressers, in a Google local business entry, plus some other individual sites?

However, since Bing is plastered with ads, (four on top, all down side, two on bottom), there is no shortage of related commercial sites to visit, it is just that they are not ranked by 'relevance' in any way, only price paid.

Is Bing too dependent on Wikipedia? If you trust Wikipedia, perhaps Bing is the search engine for you.

Why are we so obsessed with Google? Why is every post lately about Google? Because we use it every day, and they keep adding features.

Today, just a quick note to go and check out Google.com, and see their animation for Isaac Newton's birthday - watch the apple fall from the tree. This is the first time I have seen any animation in the Google logo, even though they are always making special logo's for certain occassions.