Mobile search is a hot topic again. Earlier this year we reported on mazoom.mobi, an internet search engine designed in the UK for smartphones, and now another mobile-optimised search provider has launched.
Kickvox claims to be the first of its kind, offering “a visual, integrated and categorised search experience that is designed exclusively for mobile devices”. It’s currently available as an app for iPhone and Android smartphones. Features include shortcuts and icons that replace large amounts of text, icon-based categorisation of results and integration with other services including Wikipedia and Yelp.
Alan Nowogrodski, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Kickvox, said “Mobile search is broken. The search industry is conceivably the only industry that looks virtually the same as it did a decade ago, yet the platforms that we use to search the web have changed significantly. Mobile users don’t want a laundry list of sites and cluttered text they need to squint in order to read; they want visually rich content that makes it easy to pinpoint what they need and move on.”
Juniper Research recently forecast that mobile search and discovery would grow into a $15 billion (£9.3 billion) per year market by 2017, nearly three times this year’s anticipated total revenue.