Podcast: Taptu Makes Mobile Search Social
As MSEARCHGroove reported earlier this week, Taptu is fine-tuning its “socially-assisted” mobile search service to suggest stuff we’re bound to like and related searches we’re likely to appreciate and explore during the dull moments of our daily routine (while we’re waiting around or just in search of a way to pass the time - no pun intended!).
The enhancements are the logical next step in Taptu’s ongoing strategy to place human interaction and judgment at the center of the mobile search experience.
Taptu Mobile Search - Content Summary pageAs Steve Ives, Taptu CEO, put in a recent interview with MSG, search is social. Users are not content to search for information in isolation and they want to communicate what they find. “When you’re on a mobile device, most [of what you do] has some kind of social context….You don’t finish the process as a user until you’ve interacted with somebody. So we think that finding the search results is not the end of the process; sharing the search result with somebody [marks] the end of the process, and that has to be designed into the system.”
To this end Taptu has launched 1-Tap, a feature of its mobile search service that - true to its name - lets users share their mobile search results (including cool mobile content) in one click. To save users from typing in their friends’ details, 1-Tap can also tap into other services such as Web-based email and Twitter.
But sharing is just the first step in Taptu’s ambitious strategy to give users more of a say in their mobile search results. Look for the company to innovate in the area of enabling “human-assisted results” (tools and technologies that allow people to edit their search results) and indexing social information (such as the social graph) moving forward.
Might Taptu be on to something bigger than pure PageRank?
Steve walked me through social search, search advertising and his pick of trends in this podcast. (and the rest of Peggy’s post)
