Über die mobile Suchmaschine taptu hatten wir ja schon häufiger berichtet. Nun gibt es, nach Angabe der eigenen Email-Adresse, bei taptu ein Whitepaper “Making search social - Unleashing search for the mobile generation“.

Let’s look more closely at the social context of search. Search on the desktop tends to be a solitary activity. Whether you are checking the weather, looking for an address, or catching up on the news you are in a solitary mode. When you are using Facebook, MySpace or Digg you flip into a social mode. People will sometimes group round a PC screen and search for something together but it is not the usual mode.

Not surprisingly, as search engine vendors have migrated their services to the mobile platform, they have focussed on familiar user scenarios, usually solitary, extended to the mobile context. They have worked to optimize their existing search back ends to the following kinds of activity from your mobile:

• Finding pizza
• Checking the weather
• Catching up on the news
• Finding ringtones to download
• Checking prices online while shopping
• Finding mobile games
• Finding out sports scores

However, today’s mobile search engines perform rather poorly at tasks that may have a more social context:

• Finding a friend’s phone number
• Finding photos on Facebook
• Sharing a search result with a friend
• Finding new music your friends like

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