Those of you who keep a close eye on your web server access logs may have been wondering what the botmobi crawler was doing sniffing about your site. Well now you know: we're pleased to announce that find.mobi is now in public beta.
You'll remember that we announced that we were developing a directory of mobile sites earlier in the year. Find.mobi is a demonstration of how that directory (and its associated metadata) can be used to help users quickly navigate to made-for-mobile content.
So why are we showing you this? Does the world really need another search engine? Well, we certainly think that mobile requires special attention. Why? Because mobile is different enough that some novel approaches are required. In fact, we don't even like using the word "search" because it suggests an open-ended odyssey rather than quickly finding the right result.
So what is find.mobi doing that is a little unusual?
- We're 100% focused on made-for-mobile sites. We make no attempt to index desktop content, nor do we try to transcode result targets. A well-designed mobile site is always going to be a better experience than a transcoded desktop site.
- We try hard to be aware of the user's mobile context (something we at dotMobi spend a lot of time talking about and how important it is for a good mobile experience). If you are in Italy and you search for sports, you should get a different set of results than the same search performed in the US or Germany. One context does not fit all. The more that a search tool can infer about the user's context, the fewer clicks it takes to get to the right result.
- We try to accommodate mobile web use-cases: when you are using the mobile web you are generally bored, or need to do something urgently. These are hugely divergent uses cases, yet the same tool needs to serve both needs. To try to solve this we use a faceted presentation of results to quickly help users zone in on the right set of results.
- Our user interface is designed for mobile: on the mobile web, the time cost of following the wrong link is really huge. For this reason it makes a lot of sense to front-load the user experience in order to reduce the time wasted by following links that aren't useful. The data penalty incurred is worth paying if it saves time (not to mention the data cost of following bad links):
So, it's very early days. But please try it out and let us know what you think. Comments/criticism very welcome. You can comment right here on this blog, or email to tech.features@mtld.mobi (or tech.bugs@mtld.mobi if you must!)
