Mobile search is something which seems like getting hot these days, which makes complete sense as Mobile internet usage is quite significant and has been almost doubling every year for quite sometime. Last reported in Dec 2007 by TRAI the number of users increased from 16 million in 2006 to 38 million. With the advent of 3G in India and looking at the International usage patterns and the mobile penetration in India it is very much likely that the mobile internet users surpass the traditional PC internet users soon.
Recently we’ve posted Times Internet limited launching activesearch.mobi claiming to be the India’s first mobile entertainment search engine. Today it is Ziva software, releasing it’s mobile search application for Nokia. Bangalore based Ziva Software, a mobile search start-up, incubated at IIM Bangalore, has announced that the mobile application version of its popular search engine Zook has been launched by Nokia as the featured application in its application gallery. Zook initially launched in India in March 2008 claims to be the India’s No.1 Mobile fetch engine and that it has the largest searchable index of mobile downloads (ringtones, wallpapers, ringback tones, picture messages, themes, etc.). The index also includes exact answers about local businesses, ATMs, restaurants, showtimes, weather information, bus routes and flight information, traffic status, etc., across India.
Zook can also be used to access wikipedia, dictionary, etc. In short, just about ANY question/query that a user thinks needs answering on the phone. Apart from being available through the above Nokia application, the service is also accessible via mobile browsers (www.zook.in) or just by sending a SMS to 5757 5665.
Zook application has features like Phone book integration, location aware search, proximity and presence and custom alerts.
Our experience with Zook
Quite impressed with the features list I installed the application on my Nokia E71, the GUI looks really good but it took really long to load, that’s probably because of my lousy EDGE connection on IDEA.
The location on the app shows “acquiring location” forever,though it returned decent results when I searched for “Raaz movie gurgaon”, all of the 3 results were of DT cinemas of different locations, two of them with “Book tickets option” by calling the listed contact number which is the Location-aware search feature of the app. I am still impressed with these search results because they were more sensible when Compared to google local search. The application also has location based social networking features.
Comparing Zook and Activesearch.mobi
To do a quick comparision between TIL’s activesearch.mobi and Zook’s app. I searched for katrina kaif on both of the search engines, while activesearch throwed up an error saying un-identified mobile number the zook app returned good number of image results from across the web and the one I downloaded was from flickr.
Thank you Pradeep for the positive comments. They are reassuring and helps us to make things better.
On non GPS phones, we derive the users location based on the network and the tower that one is connected to. While we have this geo-inferencing to a larger extent for Airtel and Vodafone in India, we do not have the information for other networks yet and neither can we derive it from open API’s. That is the reason for ‘“acquiring location” forever’ that you faced. We are working towards this and should improve our location capabilities, both algorithmically and coverage wise soon.
Should you have suggestions, please do let us know.