What exactly will be the nature of mobile search in the future? How will technology enable people to conveniently search and retrieve relevant information from the touch of a button from their mobile handset (be it an iPhone, Blackberry or some other smart device)? Say, you are visiting the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building for the first time and you want to know the history of the site or the building, wouldn’t it be nice to point your phone, snap a picture and do a search on the building and get your answers instantaneously. This type of sophisticated search is not far in the future.

A number of companies are looking into capitalizing the new wave of mobile search. For instance Microsoft is working on software called Lincoln that, once downloaded into phones, will allow people to access online movie reviews by just snapping pictures of movie posters, DVD covers, or from an advertisement on a magazine or displayed on the side of buses.

But Microsoft is not alone. There are other players in the market. Kooaba and SnapTell services allows you to point to a real-world object, snap it and send pictures to their servers that will return results relevant to the context of the object.

This technology is not only useful for consumers but also a boon to advertisers who intend to promote products or services through this untouched medium. For publishers it is a great way to measure how readers engage and interact with ads they see. This could be a data mine for advertisers to do further marketing.

There are others who are exploring ways to detect your location using your phone’s GPS location mapping functionality to serve you targeted content. For example, Sprint and Microsoft are teaming up to offer local maps, location of nearby retail outlets, post offices etc based on your location (assuming you carry a GPS capable phone). GeoPedia uses your iPhone’s positional data to find your approx location and then sends wikipedia articles about points of interest around you at that moment. More sites are looking to integrate localized information with social networking capabilities. GyPSii’s WebTop uses GPS, user generated content, photo and video sharing to instantly connect and track people anywhere in the world. Yahoo’s oneSearch allows you to speak your query as you would type in a search box and get relevant results.

Personally I believe that we only just started to scratch the surface of the mobile search technology. Keep reading to stay on top of what’s next in mobile.

Chan Komagan | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.