With Peggy Salz
Mobile Search Expert

On Friday, I wrote that the Apple Apps Store offers 150+ search tools (and I didn’t dwell on it, but the search functionality to find the search tools in the first place is poor at best). A browse today through Nokia WidSets (a service that allows users to download, create and share widgets you can check out here) reveals 62 widgets related to search. (Although I have to say I can’t figure out why Steelers Football shows up in the results. But since I was born in Pittsburgh and am naturally a huge fan of the Steelers, let’s just say it’s a great app – even though the connection to mobile search is unclear.)

What’s the point of all this?

With 5,000+ widgets on offer in the content library, Nokia must sharpen its focus on search, allowing the 7 million+ users that downloaded widgets to date to explore WidSets and find the widgets they want on their device.

A huge and significant step in this direction is today’s news that Nokia has selected Mobile Content Networks (MCN) - a provider of federated mobile search solutions and most notably the white-label search platform MobileSearch.net - to power WidSets Search. WidSets Search has launched in Finland and will be rolled out to European and global users as part of the global WidSets initiative.

True to its name, WidSets Search will allow users to search and find new widgets. In addition, MCN enables users to discover digital content and information in “channels” including: weather, games, music, yellow pages and images. More categories are in the pipeline and I caught up with Stephen Burke, MCN SVP Marketing, earlier today to get the inside track on the Nokia deal and plans for mobile advertising.

Read the entire post on Peggy’s blog MSearchGroove HERE.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, News, Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.