At first glance, this seems to be a great new tool to streamline the flow of information between our online and offline worlds. But how well does Google's new local mobile search work in reality?

This video from the Google team shows more about how to star certain locations in Google Maps while at a computer and use the different features of local search for mobile:

Sounds great, right?

But when we tried to use Google's local search tab on a mobile device, some of the results we got were strange and disappointing. We were searching for "coffee" and "WiFi" in southeastern Virginia, and the top result was for the Hotel Taj Bengal Kolkat in West Bengal. And although we do enjoy the Cafe de Paris in Monte Carlo, we do not think this was an appropriate second result for local search in Virginia.

When we narrowed our search to just "coffee", we got better results, but who wants just coffee with no WiFi?

Next, we tried browsing the categories, again with mixed results. The ability to access saved and recent searches, however, was stellar and is probably users' best bet for getting around to local businesses while on-the-go.

Mobile analyst firm MSearchGroove has just published the results of a series of tests which show that the mobile search service ChaCha beat out two other voice-enabled search applications on the iPhone when it comes to search query accuracy. [Update, Ed: a commenter points out that the report was actually sponsored by ChaCha] To test this, the researchers used Google's own mobile application and Vlingo for iPhone, an app that lets you search both Google or Yahoo. Oddly, they ignored Yahoo's mobile app, which also has voice search built in.

The results of their study aren't entirely shocking: if you want to be understood, ask a human, not a computer.

ChaCha's mobile search service can be accessed both by SMS and by calling a toll-free 1-800 number. Since these tests focused on voice search, the phone-in method was used. When using ChaCha, the service identified the queries accurately in 94.4% of the cases and delivered accurate search results 88.9% of the time. Vlingo, which the researchers used to test Yahoo search, only interpreted queries correctly in 72.2% of the cases and delivered accurate results 27.8% of the time. Google, surprisingly, fared worst of all. Their mobile application only understood spoken queries in 16.7% of tests and delivered accurate results 22.2% of the time.

To test the applications, the researchers conducted two rounds of tests using both keyword search and natural language queries where they asked questions using sentences. The queries represented a cross-section of typical mobile searches in categories like navigation, directions, local search, general information, social search, and long-tail search.

It's not all that surprising to find that ChaCha outperformed the other voice-enabled applications - after all, they have real, live humans on the other end of the line to interpret the spoken questions. What is surprising, though, is how wide the gap is in between the human-powered search and the speech recognition apps, especially when contrasting ChaCha with Google.

Did Google Just Get Beaten at Search?

When you think of search, you tend to think "Google." When you use Google, there's a certain expectation that your queries will be interpreted accurately and your results will be relevant. What these tests show, however, is that when it comes to the mobile platform, all bets are off. Not only was Google outperformed by a mobile application whose name few mainstream users have probably heard of (Vlingo), they were also outperformed by a crowdsourced workforce who answer ChaCha queries in their spare time. Could this mean that mobile search is an area - perhaps the only area - where a competitor could actually get a foothold and steal away a bit of Google's market share?

Well, not so fast. Google could still dominate on mobile thanks to brand recognition alone. Mainstream users aren't going to seek out new alternatives to search, even if they're better. That's precisely why companies like Microsoft have to spend millions of dollars on advertising campaigns just to gain a percentage point or two of search market share.

Then there's the fact that tests which compare human-interpreted queries to machine-interpreted ones seem a little unfair. We all know that people can still understand each other much better than computers can. (Well, for now at least). ChaCha wins this round, but only because this was never a fair fight to begin with. Speech recognition and natural language processing are technologies still in their infancy. But if we know Google, they're coding away right now to improve them as we speak.

Of course, a search engine that doesn't return good results is useless, no matter how good the interface, but Taptu's search results are generally good. While focusing on sites that work well on mobile devices is great, it limits the number of results which can often be a disadvantage. Modern phones also tend to be rather good at displaying any web site you throw at them, so Taptu's advantage here (if it really is one), might only be temporary.

Oddly, especially for a mobile search engine, Taptu doesn't feature any maps in its search results and it doesn't seem to optimize its search based on your location.

Taptu has a good number of very interesting features, though. You can, for example, choose if you want to be taken to a slightly stripped down version of a site it found, or if you want to see the full version of that site. Especially on older phones and slow connections, this can be a real advantage.

iPhone App Coming Soon

Taptu also announced that it is working on a native iPhone app, which should be available soon. Taptu heralds its iPhone app as the "world's first search service specifically for touch devices and the touch web." This does sound intriguing, but without being able to test drive the app, we will have to sit back and see if Taptu can live up to its promise. We do hope, though, that the app will fix some of the shortcomings of Taptu's mobile site. The company already offers an iPhone app (iTunes link) that gives users access to an iPhone-optimized view of Wikipedia.

A related deal could put Windows Mobile in places that Google Android could be, as well, and the decision will come down to money more than it will quality of service for users. We like a lot of what Microsoft is doing these days, but we prefer the Google search experience and are hopeful for Android-driven innovation. Thus we hope that Microsoft can't pay its way into the center of hundreds of millions of more phones.

Mobile Search

Dan Frommer reported this summer that Google was working on a deal that would put their search bar on the top of Verizon mobile screens and he reported again this fall on a study that showed Google already has huge dominance in the mobile search market. (Yahoo is a distant second, Microsoft is nowhere to be seen in that study.)

Now the Wall St. Journal says that Microsoft may win a Verizon deal because "the software giant is offering significantly better financial incentives" than Google. As users, we prefer using Google for mobile search.

Mobile OS - Paying to Lock Out Android?

Microsoft is also negotiating a deal to put Windows Mobile software on more Verizon devices, according to the same reports. We like Windows Mobile but would love to see the even more open Google Android get a fair chance on Verizon phones. Of course there are huge sums of money on the line, but it's just one more part of the twisted picture of mobile carrier control to think of what a deal like this could do to the open mobile web that Android is aiming to create.

Get Ready for More Mobile Ads!

Mobile advertising is already big and is only going to get bigger. According to a recent study from mobile social networking company Limbo and GfK Technology:

40 percent of mobile phone users in the U.S., about 100 million people, recalled seeing an advertisement on their phone during 3Q08 (about two-thirds of the ads were text messages; the other one-third were display ads).

We're sure those numbers are only going to increase, and while we could care less who's serving up those ads - ad deals are intimately tied to search deals and in this case would presumably influence mobile Operating System deals as well.

While we honestly admire many of the things that Microsoft is doing of late and have serious concerns about Google's control over the general information universe - we're hoping from an innovation and quality of service perspective to see more Google and less Microsoft on hundreds of millions of phones.

Available exclusively on Windows Mobile devices, Google makes good use of its Gears Geolocation API to get an approximate ID on where you're located. The API uses the same Cell ID technology Google uses for Google Maps on mobile devices. How does this affect your local search results? With My Location, users only have to type in whatever they're searching for without adding a location in. Whether it's sushi, the weather, or a local restaurant, Google will find both your results and your location. The API does most of the heavy work and cuts down on the amount of time spent typing in all of that information. We think this beats having to change your location every time you travel to another city or state.

Addressing Privacy Concerns

If you're concerned about your privacy, Google does its best to make sure your information is protected. According to the latest Google Mobile blog update,

"We take your privacy seriously and have designed Search with My Location so that it doesn't associate your location with any personally identifiable information, even if you are logged in. We won't send your location until you explicitly opt in, and you can always opt-out from the Gears Settings under the Tools menu."

We're glad they noted that you're opted-out of this option by default.

Limited Availability

Unfortunately, only a handful of Windows Mobile devices are currently supported. It would've been nice to see this in the Google app for the iPhone too. International Google users will also have to wait for this feature, as it is only available in the US and UK. To check and see if your device is supported, head to "www.google.com" on your mobile web browser. A "My Location" link should be available right under the search box. You may have to refresh the page to see the link. If refreshing doesn't help then your device probably isn't supported at the moment. My Location is a small, but more than welcomed feature for Google Local search. Here's a brief clip provided by Google on how "Search with My Location can help save your thumbs".

Image Credit: The Official Google Mobile Blog

Presumably there's some money changing hands and we can't help but wonder how much. It's Google's payment to Mozilla for being the default search engine in Firefox that makes that browser financially viable.

Some people say (only partly in jest) that Google does in fact own a browser - Firefox. Have deals gone on behind the scenes than mean Google now effectively owns a mobile browser too? These up-front payments for default placement are later more than made up for through search ad click throughs - and mobile is a key emerging market in search advertising.

In this case there is probably not a major shift in power going on over Opera, since the company has what should be a major revenue stream in the sale of browser installs themselves. For some reason, people are willing to pay for a better mobile browser despite widespread insistence that web and desktop software should be free. A large portion of Opera customers are Europeans, though, so perhaps that explains it.

None the less, it was probably seen at Google as a major coup to score this deal and they may have been willing to spend a lot of money on it. If Safari on the iPhone is the elite upper class mobile browser, Opera is the browser of the growing middle class in that space.

Opera users in general tend to be vehement advocates of the browser. While Firefox users will sometimes go to the trouble of telling you how much they like their browser, the smaller number of Opera fans are much more outspoken. I could comfortably hold my breath between putting up this post and the time that it will take for an Opera lover to post a comment about how wonderful this fast, standards compliant browser is on the desktop and the phone. (Please don't prove me wrong.)

For more informed coverage of this news see the blog of mobile search specialists MSearchGroove, where presumably it will be covered soon. Readers interested in mobile news should check out the RWW toolkit for 2008, a package of resources for tracking key issues like mobile in the coming year.

The Memphis-based startup is the latest addition to VC firm Mercury Technology Labs LLC's portfolio. The service is so new that I actually saw their web site change as I wrote this post - what began as a simple landing page with broken links morphed into a full-on web site describing each of their offerings in detail.

The company, founded by Rajesh Ramanand, was started out of winning the FedEx Institute of Technology Business Plan Competition in the Summer of 2007. Ramanand, a part-time Doctoral student in Computer Science at the University of Memphis currently researches Text Classification problems. Before TextBound, he worked at FedEx Innovation Labs, the R&D division of FedEx Corporation.

TextBound's REZZEE Service

The service is launching with a test of their marketing application in the real estate industry, details of which can be found on a site called REZZEE, where real estate agents can sign up and test the app in beta form.

How will it work? Fortunately, the service doesn't spam you with information, it's opt-in. Explains Ramanand: "You drive by a house for sale; you see a sign telling you to send a text message containing a certain keyword to a certain number; you instantly receive a text message with the house's price, number of bedrooms, exact address and the name of the listing agent. Clicking on a link in the text message will send you to a TextBound-hosted Web site with photos of the property, the appraised value of nearby houses, etc."

According to the site, agents using the service are reporting more prospective buyer leads, increased number of offers, more closings, and more listings...of course, that could just be marketing-speak...they are in the business. It's more likely that the service is simply too new to be able to analyze its results yet, but still, it's an interesting idea.

Real estate professionals who want to join REZZEE can sign up for this service for free from this page.

BandBound

REZZEE is but one of TextBound's offerings, though, it's just the first to launch. The next property to launch appears to be BandBound, which came online just now. Bands will be able to use this service to reach fans who have opted-in to receive alerts. They can text their fans with details of upcoming shows, ticket sales, or anything else they desire.

Future Services

Future TextBound services will include ArenaBound, which will market to attendees of sports events and FoodBound, which will be a text message ordering and commerce system, but no details are available for either of those just yet.

Conclusion

And so arrives mobile marketing. Since TextBound's services are opt-in, we are at least being spared text message spam ads (for now). It also doesn't appear that any of the services are location-based in the sense that ads are being targeted via GPS, but it's foreseeable with the ArenaBound and FoodBound programs it would make sense for them to use that methodology.

I'm sure that, in the near future, TextBound will be just one of many mobile marketing services. I just hope they are all opt-in!

Buzzd, a provider of local real-time search information for bars, clubs and restaurants, won the jury, audience and community awards under the 'early stage' category.

Buzzd is finding its way in the Mobile Web world via partnerships with Citysearch, Helio, Flavorpill and Time Out New York. There's a good demo of how the service works here - but basically it allows you to find an event near where you are, then 'shout out' to friends to meet you there. There is a social networking component, whereby you can meet other users at the events. Here is a screenshot from the demo:

Other winners at the MobileMonday Awards included mobile search service Taptu (see ReadWriteWeb's review of Taptu) and open source email and messaging company Funambol - who both won in the Emerging Community category. Local Spanish favorite Kimia, a rich media content provider, took out the audience choice.

This is just one of a number of "powered by SeeqPod" announcements you'll likely be seeing if you are interested in music search. Josh Lowensohn reported on yet another, called Songerize, today. Enjoy the music and the API action while you can, because SeeqPod is too good to be true and is headed for court.

Maybe it's just too beautiful to live. Warner Music Group is suing Seeqpod, the finest music site I've seen on the internet, because it allows people to scour the net for music, put it in a playlist and play it for free. Naturally, not all the music files it finds has dotted all its copyright i's or crossed many legal t's.

For now, if you're looking for a good web page mobilizer - much less an mobile MP3 search engine, check out Mowser. If you're unfamiliar with SeeqPod - here's a taste below.