It’s hard to turn around now without someone talking about how great the iPhone is, or how cool the newest application for it is. But did you know that the iPhone still only accounts for about 1.1% of the world’s mobile phone market share? A lot of people use Blackberrys and SmartPhones, but the overwhelming majority of mobile phone users still don’t even have data service.

But the market is catching up quickly. In fact, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin just reported in his annual “founders letter” that in Japan, a third of all searches are coming from mobile devices, so the proliferation of advanced mobile use in the US has only just begun.

The ultimate goal with any search though, regardless of platform (mobile or web), is to understand the semantic intent behind it. This is the crux of our philosophy here at Acronym, and we call it Keyword-Driven Marketing. Perhaps one of the best things about mobile search platforms is that they really rely on the search engine to decode the intent behind the keywords you use; they have very little other information to go on. Someday, the same technologies that exist on the web – IP detection (GPS on mobile), history caching, and ability to personalize results in a Digg-like environment – will exist on mobile as well, but this technology isn’t mainstream yet.

With the relative infancy of mobile search, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite mobile search options. It may surprise you that two of them don’t even require data service!

Here are two great search options that work with any service:

• GOOG411: With a simple phone call to 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), you can access Google’s voice activated service to get local results. This is great for when you are using your hands-free phone option. With one simple voice command, you can access a list of Google’s Top 8 results for any local search query. You can select one of the Top 8 and be connected immediately, or you can have the address and phone number sent to you in a text message. You can even have a map or directions sent to you. And I promise, the speech recognition on this service is a lot better than the last phone call you made to your insurance company.




• Text Google (466453) is similarly powerful. Send a simple command, like “Star Trek 10118” to Google, and it will interpret the meaning of your keyword and send you a text message with the result you are most likely looking for. In this case, it would send me movie listings for Star Trek near zipcode 10118. You can get directions, maps or movie listings through local search, or you can get flight information, stock prices, sports scores, use a calculator or even have Google translate a word or phrase for you. There are many other possible commands – check them out here.




• If you have data service but don’t want to download memory-hogging apps, try iGoogle (or Yahoo OneSearch or MSN mobile, but I’m a Google girl). iGoogle mobile works the same way your iGoogle on the web does. You can access your Gmail, Breaking News from CNN, BBC, or many other news sources, get a quote of the day, add a stock ticker, get weather, have movie times update automatically, or any one of over two dozen other options. The two things I like best about iGoogle are:




• Local search: I travel a lot between my home in Raleigh, NC and Acronym’s HQ in New York. iGoogle saves my locations as I set them in my preferences, and then when I search, I can toggle back and forth between them as needed. So yesterday, a search for “Chipotle” would have brought up the location near my home in Raleigh. Today, I’m in NY, so I obviously want the Chipotle in the Empire State Building, where my office is. All I have to do is click on “change” under location and click on “New York, NY” which is one of my “recent locations.” Until I have a phone with GPS enabled, this is the next best thing.




• I can make my iGoogle settings on my phone different from my settings on my web browser, and neither one will interfere with each other. Some might see this as double work, but since I regularly access things on my web browser that I don’t access on my phone (such as my RSS feed), this makes it easier for me to get to what I use most in either setting.

So there you have it. Until the average person’s phone catches up with the technology enabled by iPhone, Blackberry Storm and the like, search will still be supported in a variety of simple ways. And since the search options listed above are all powered by major web search engines, the capabilities and the results are improving daily as the engines’ algorithms adjust and respond to the keywords their audience wants information for. It’s Keyword-Driven Marketing at its best!