2007 will be the year of mobile search

Paul Yiu of Yahoo! Search posted news of oneSearch on Yahoo's YSearchBlog a few hours ago. The beta sample is now full. That's partly a testament to the power of corporate blogging, the interest in mobile search and partly due to Yahoo only offering a small beta group.

oneSearch is an upgraded mobile search offering from Yahoo. The first person to try and coin the phrase Mobile Search 2.0 gets shot. What oneSearch does is optimise search results so that they fit mobile phone screens better, optimise search navigation so that there is less fiddly navigation to do and uses applications designed to work specifically on certain mobile models. My Nokia N80 can run oneSearch.

Let's watch Google for the lead on mobile search though. We have to watch Google for the lead on any search technology in 2007. What might we see? We'll see a big advertising push from Google on mobile search. Here in the UK that's a no brainer. We're a year ahead of the US on mobile usage (at least) and Google banners for mobile have been running already this year. Not only are there more phones in the UK than there are computers - there are more mobile phones in the UK than there are people.

I think we'll see official support for mobile maps and we may even see a mobile map which can track your location.

I look forward to getting access to oneSearch. Let's hope the beta goes better than Yahoo's WebRank display in their toolbar.

Update: Google Mobile deal with Samsung +4 hours after this post.