We were quoted in the cover story article of launch issue of Mobile Communications International (MCI) that was issued at 3GSM yesterday. The article Mobile Search 2.0: Relevancy Rules by Peggy Ann Salz talks about the next iteration of mobile search and what will make it successful. It has good analysis, stats, and comments from our friends at Google, Yahoo, MCN, Infospace, Medio, and others. After the introductory paragraphs, the article opens with our quote.

By 2010, the, “gap between the average number of searches that a user does on their desktop and the number of searches they do on their mobiles will vanish,” says Chetan Sharma, president of Chetan Sharma Consulting, a strategic advisory firm. Today, he estimates, desktop search outpaces mobile search by a ratio of 3:1. But the revenue potential of the mobile search market in the US alone is set to reach $2.5bn in 2010, up from just $100m in 2007. And these estimates don’t include enterprise mobile search, a vertical poised for growth as more road warriors demand remote access to information and applications on-the-fly.

Google’s View

The mobile search experience on a personal device like the mobile phone must be more in tune with the individual user, says Deep Nishar, Google’s director of product management.

“Mobile search isn’t about browsing, it’s about finding,” Nishar says. “The next level is going to be about understanding what the user is doing and using this insight to give them results and information that are more in line with their personal usage as opposed to functional usage.”

In Nishar’s view, personalised search should satisfy three requirements: it should learn and adapt to each user (if a user always looks for traffic conditions between home and work, then they shouldn’t have to type in the route every day); it should base results on recent activities (if a user has been researching HDTVs on the mobile web, then the system should learn from the queries to volunteer additional relevant results); and it should understand the user well enough to only deliver useful results (if a user has never asked to see weather results in a search, then the system should not present them as part of the mix).

Google intends to sharpen its focus on personalised search, building on existing capabilities and features such as Google Maps and its personalised home page. While Nishar is tight-lipped about products in the pipeline, personalisation will be the thread that ties them together. “Google’s approach to search is about user-centricity.” Moving forward, and beginning with announcements during 3GSM, Google will use its tools and techniques to, “get the right users for individual users every time they search.”

Yahoo’s View

Likewise, relevancy runs like a leitmotiv through Yahoo’s new product offer and its future roadmap. It has revamped its approach by releasing oneSearch, a Web 2.0-type search engine that picks up on users’ intent, intuits the information they want and then presents the relevant content, grouped by subject, in synopsis form. A sports search on oneSearch, for example, will return a relevant bundle of scores from a team’s most recent game, along with game schedules, team rosters, photos, local results, and so on.

“First-generation search was really just repeating the search experience on the PC, and that, the industry has learned, was a fatal error,” notes Geraldine Wilson, vice president of Connected Life, Yahoo, Europe, the business group responsible for the company’s “beyond the browser” strategy.

Drawing from customer research Yahoo created a mobile search experience from the mobile user’s perspective. “One result that stood out is that users want fast answers, really instant answers,” Wilson explains. More importantly, users will vote with their feet if the search results aren’t relevant. While Wilson can’t divulge Yahoo’s next move, she assures that enabling targeted advertising – based on the user’s profile, preferences and search patterns, as well as on oneSearch’s pivotal position as the “route on to the mobile internet” – is a top priority. Adding location and local content to the mix is also a chief focus.

MCN’s view

Sensing a business opportunity in aggregating mobile search results from all the search engines, Mobile Content Networks (MCN) is the first out of the gates with a search engine platform that can incorporate the results of all search engines into a relevant subset of results. More importantly, MCN can also connect with the indexes that are growing and flourishing under the radar such as blogs, user-created music, and videos, allowing operators to offer and monetise the legendary Long Tail of content.

The approach, part of what MCN calls its “real-time mobile search platform,” effectively casts a net over the internet to capture more content hidden in its depths. “Aggregating search results creates a ‘more’ section for the users and increases the likelihood that they will see something they like,” Marc Bookman, MCN CEO says. It also increases the opportunity for operators to generate mobile advertising revenues through sponsored search and a variety of other monetisation models.

Infospace’s view

Likewise, InfoSpace, a white-label search engine company that has a long track record in the online space with its internet search engine dogpile.com, is bouncing back after restructuring with technologies and techniques to personalise search results and recommend relevant content. The company is currently gearing up to launch a, “carrier-focused client software-based scheme that can follow the clues users leave on their phone to deliver a more relevant and more comprehensive” mobile search experience, explains Brendan Benzing, InfoSpace VP of Mobile Search.

The company is also “in the process” of developing an on-device application that will “bring mobile search closer to the users in an above-the-browser experience,” Benzing says. Two options are in the running: delivering mobile search in the form of an icon on the phone or harnessing the phone’s idle screen to deliver personalised content (see box). “The paradigm is content-push, so it would be about pushing relevant content to the users without them having to ask for it, or initiate a browser session.”

Medio’s view

Improving relevancy of search results also sits at the centre of Medio Systems’ tie-up with T-Mobile USA to improve mobile search on the mobile operator’s t-zones portal. However, Medio’s mobile search and merchandising solution is not only about delivering relevant content; it’s designed to recommend content to users based on their intent, exposing users to more of what’s stored deep in the t-zones catalog, observes Brian Lent, Medio CEO.

It is clear that w/o relevancy search is meaningless. Furthermore, w/o relevancy mobile advertising is spam with varying shades of gray. Question is who is best suited to deliver this. Clearly carriers are. But, can they? this question is going to keep the industry busy for some time.