Friday, October 27, 2006
Ask Mobile Search - Cool Features That Work
Yes, I know, it was launched on the 10th of October and I'm just now getting around to writing something about it... Let's just say I don't jump on the bandwagon of every new press release. However, after prompting for some thoughts from a friend I decided to give Ask Mobile Search a try. The thing I like most about Ask's Mobile search feature isn't that it's available on my phone (all mobile search apps are), no it's something much simpler. It's the fact that I can actually test it out within my normal web browser from my computer before I ever try it out on my phone.Now I know that may sound off the wall but hear me out. If you go to http://mobile.ask.com/ you can try out the service from your pc without getting your thumbs bruised or wanting to throw your phone against the wall. Google doesn't let you do that. You see Google took a different approach. They detect your browser with a fancy little javascript app (probably took an engineer a week to make it work with all browsers) and see if you're on a mobile phone browser... If you're not then you get kicked out to the Google Mobile Search "Marketing" page asking you to give them your mobile number so they can text/sms you the link to your phone. Of course they just want your phone number for marketing demographic stats purposes and put it under the pretense of making it easier for you to navigate to their mobile search from your phone.
Ask doesn't do that, they don't play games. If you want to see the size images that will be returned to your phone when you use their search results then you just go to their mobile search page and enter your query, that's it! It's that simplicity that allowed me to play with their mobile search platform before I ever opened up my phone.
Didn't Google build it's business model around simplicity?
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 03:11 PM
Permanent Link: Ask Mobile Search - Cool Features That Work
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