Yahoo Unveils Upgrades to Mobile Search Platform
Yahoo has announced upgrades to its mobile search platform, oneSearch. The 2.0 version of the service includes brand spankin new features to make searching on the go a little easier.
A major new update is the addition of voice search. Yahoo is partnering with vLingo, a speech recognition company, to provide the service. The more a searcher uses the voice search, the more the technology recognizes an individual’s voice and can adapt to it. Initially, the voice search will only be available for select Blackberry devices, including the Curve and the Pearl. In coming months, the service is expected to expand to include more devices.
Other new features to oneSearch include predictive type completion and contextual recommendations as you type in a search query. For example, as you start to type in “apple,” oneSearch will guess what you’re trying to type as you enter the first few letters. And users also may get suggestions to search for “apple iphone,” “apple stock price,” or “apple stock price.”
Yahoo is also opening up the platform to publishers and developers. By doing so, the company hopes to:
— Turn web search results into answers – the usefulness of the results increase as more actual content is returned versus traditional web links
— Unlock the power of the Semantic Web – results integrate more helpful content, much that otherwise is not usually surfaced in search results
— Provide more relevant content – consumers receive richer information, into which they can dive deeply
Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo! said about the updates, “With Yahoo! oneSearch 2.0, we are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones.”