Search technology designed to work on mobile devices

March 15, 2005

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Fast Search and Transfer ASA has unveiled what it considers to be a first in the market, namely search technology designed specifically to work on mobile devices.

The company reckons FAST mSearch is a first in the sector, and certainly a spokesperson for rival enterprise search developer Autonomy admitted that that company has no such technology in its arsenal right now.

The other big name in enterprise search, Verity, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

David Isaacson, senior product marketing manager at Oslo, Norway-based FAST said its core product, Enterprise Search Platform (ESP), was itself initially developed for deployment on mobile networks, with Finnish handset manufacture Nokia as a partner in the early stages of R&D.;

Nokia dropped out a year into the project, however, and ESP was repositioned as a generic search technology, he explained.

Development of mobile search continued, however, and indeed, a custom version of mSearch has been Vodafone Group's worldwide search solution for the last two years, he went on.

"Now we've productized the technology and are aiming it at three target markets: carriers, content providers and the enterprise market."

The primary challenge faced by FAST was the small form factors of mobile devices, which require specially tailored content.

In reality, the reason it has not launched the product earlier was "market conditions rather than technology," Isaacson acknowledged.

There are two components to the offering.

First is Portal Search, which looks only within an operator's wall garden of content, i.e. where it has relationships in place with content providers and is deriving revenue from them.

The second is Mobile Web, where the subscriber is allowed out onto the open web and is thus searching for content whether or not the provider is in a relationship with the carrier.

Operators who are allowing subscribers outside the walled garden are often now doing so at a more expensive rate than within it, so mSearch can help the carrier manage the transition, Isaacson argued.

As for charging, FAST was reluctant to go into details, but did explain that Portal Search is licensed in "a classic enterprise software model", whereas Mobile Web is on a cost-per-thousand-searches basis.

Isaacson said he expected competition for mSearch to come not from Autonomy or Verity, but rather the big search developers for the public internet such as Google and Yahoo!. He noted, though: "Will the telcos want to team up with them, only to find that down the road the search brand will become more visible than the carrier's?"

Source: Datamonitor

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