Telstra takes aim at Google with enhanced BigPond mobile search

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by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 14 July 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Google has made massive strides in working to dominate search from mobile phones as much as it does search from desktop computers, but they’re not the only ones. In Australia, Telstra’s assets BigPond, Sensis, Yellow Pages and other sites it owns are being promoted to users as a “convenient” way to find what you’re looking for from your mobile phone – but will Google still win anyway? Related stories Optus: Telstra “threatened” by our rapid network expansion Sex among older Australians gets an unexpected lift Should you fly the capped mobile broadband skies with iPrimus? Telstra challenges “ludicrous” Optus to get “independent audit” IBM brings another jobs boost to Ballarat Telstra is launching an enhanced version of BigPond Search for its Next G phones, saying they’re making it easier to search for your favourite web site, restaurant, ringtone, game, song and even Wikipedia. But its biggest competitor is Google, which has already established a mighty beachhead in the world of search direct from mobile phones, whether through visiting its website on your phone’s browser, or through a search bar on the ‘home’ screen of many mobiles. Google’s success has caused the alarm bells to ring loud and clear at its competitors for quite some time now. Microsoft is also a competitior, having poured millions into its “Live” Search engine, recently buying natural language search company Powerset, and still in the race to buy out Yahoo on its own terms to fight the greater search fight. Microsoft has also put a “Live Search Bar” onto its Windows Mobile smartphones to capture whatever part of the mobile search market that it can, too. Meanwhile, other companies have put a “Google search bar” right onto the “home” screen of their mobile phones or as an option in their “walled gardens” of content. But telcos such as Telstra have transformed their own “Yellow Pages” divisions into Google search engine competitors, or at least, have tried to. While the Yellow and White Pages online services from Telstra’s “Sensis” division have been claimed by some to be rather woeful, requiring rather precise details to find information. This is something that’s a bit counter-intuitive when “searching” for information because you likely don’t have all the details, but just some of them. Sensis themselves say they’ve poured lots of time, money and programming resources into vastly improving its search properties, something we explored in a previous iTWire article entitled “Sensis response to poor result claims: try us again and be surprised”. So, what exactly is Telstra claiming it will do in the mobile search space? Continued on page 2... << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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