Google Plans Search Service for Mobile Content
Companies Featured in This Article: Google, AT&T, eBay, Apple, Yahoo, Vodafone Group, Time Warner, Medio Systems, Deutsche Telekom, Alltel, Microsoft — Google Inc. is developing a new search service for cellphones that will help consumers find …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's confirmed plan to build a cellphone search service lands just as mobile browsing stops being theoretical: Apple's iPhone, launched weeks earlier on AT&T's network, has already flooded Duke University's wireless LAN with 18,000 requests per second, and a survey of early buyers found 90% highly satisfied — with confirmed evidence that Apple and AT&T are pulling customers off rival carriers.
The company roster attached to the story — AT&T, Vodafone Group, Deutsche Telekom, Alltel, plus rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and mobile-search specialist Medio Systems — signals that the fight is not just about a search box, but about who mediates content discovery on the handset: carrier portals or an outside engine.
First-order effects
- Google moves its ad-supported search franchise onto the handset, putting it in direct competition with Yahoo, Microsoft and Medio Systems for mobile query volume at the moment device-side browsing demand is surging.
- Carriers including AT&T, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom face an immediate gatekeeping question over whether searches route through their own on-deck portals or through Google's off-deck service.
Second-order effects
- If iPhone-style satisfaction keeps pulling subscribers toward AT&T while Google supplies discovery off-deck, other carriers' walled-garden content menus lose both traffic and the merchandising leverage they charge content providers for.
- Yahoo and Microsoft, whose core search businesses are anchored to the PC, would be pushed to accelerate their own mobile offerings rather than cede the small screen by default.
Third-order effects
- A pattern of desktop-class search migrating to phones points toward mobile advertising becoming an extension of the keyword auction, with whichever engine holds the default position capturing the market — a structural shift of power from network operators to software intermediaries that regulators and carriers alike would have to reckon with.
The trend: Search is following users from the desktop to the handset, turning the carrier portal into the next incumbent that a default search engine can disintermediate.