We’ve said several times that mobile and sms search tools are rapidly gaining steam in the U.S. Today, Yahoo Mobile has introduced a few new services.
Yahoo has added local search, web search, and image search to their already large set of mobile services (news alerts, games, IM, etc.) delivered to your wireless web browser.
Yahoo Local is now available for mobile users. Results include ratings, maps, and directions. If you have a My Yahoo account, your saved locations are also available. You can also dial the phone number included in the result listing directly from the results page.
I wouldn’t be surprised that sometime soon Yahoo will begin working with wireless carriers to automatically detect the searchers location (at the time of the search) and base directions off of that data.
Today is also the debut of the Yahoo image and web databases on Yahoo Mobile. Your wireless web browser will need to be HTML capable.
Image results pages contain three images per page while web results contain five links per page.
Mobile searching is the perfect place to use search shortcuts and we’ve seen Yahoo introduce a number of them over the past several months. For example, entering weather [city name, Zip} will place the current temperature and conditions at the top of the results page. NOTE: At the moment not every Yahoo shortcut works on the mobile service. I tested several of them and found that these work:
+ weather
+ calculator
+ sports scores
+ stock quotes
+ dictionary definitions
Search results page accessed via Yahoo Mobile do NOT contain keyword or contextual advertising.
To access Yahoo Mobile on your wireless browser, go to:
http://mobile.yahoo.com
I’ve been using Yahoo’s mobile services for over a year (I’m a Treo guy) and the addition of these new services is great. Search is quickly becoming more than a desktop only service.
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