Putting Search on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Mobile
Post categories: mobile
| 17:38 UK time, Thursday, 3 September 2009
Most of us using the mobile internet have specific goals when it comes to using the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ site - finding out the latest sports updates; checking the news and weather; finding out when a favourite programme is on, or watching it on mobile iPlayer.
There are thousands of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ web pages on the mobile site, a whole world of additional content that you more than likely don't know about.
Offering search on mobile is a no-brainer - it gets you to the content you want with the least possible effort - so I'm very pleased to announce that we have finally launched a beta search on the mobile homepage.
I say finally as we in the mobile team, and our colleagues in Search have had many 'interesting' challenges developing ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ search for mobile. We know it's crucial to get the results right first time on mobile - and taking our website search and making it work to that goal was a complex project. We had to work with many different content providers across the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, getting the right metadata into their pages - no mean feat.
We spent weeks fine tuning the search logic, weighting our search terms, and we now know more about the idiosyncrasies of search logic that we ever thought we would need to.
Mobile search is still not perfect, but it's been a long time coming and we wanted to get it launched and YOU using it, to get your ever-valuable feedback on where it needs more work.
What can you search?
You can search news, sport, radio & television web pages, and if your device supports iPlayer, you can also search iPlayer programmes, by TV or radio. You can filter your results by these categories, and also by relevance and date.What can't you search?
Currently, you can't search the h2g2 mobile site, or our dynamic /programmes information - the same on the desktop. We're looking to include these areas in future versions of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Mobile Search - and if you want to search our programming information, there is already a search for that purpose on www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/tv.Adding the Search box
If you're using the default mobile homepage (without any customisation ), you'll find the Search box at the bottom. You can move it wherever you want it on the homepage using the customisation feature, as with the other content topics. If you have customised your homepage, you need to click the "Customise your homepage" link to add the Search box to your homepage. It will be automatically added to all users' homepages once it's out of beta.Try it out, leave us your comments, but most importantly, get where you want quickly , and discover new areas on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Mobile.
Ulyssa MacMillan is Executive Producer, Mobile Browser.
Comment number 1.
At 3rd Sep 2009, dennisjunior1 wrote:Ulyssa MacMillan:
I am hopeful that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ will be putting search on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Mobile....
=Dennis Junior=
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Comment number 2.
At 4th Sep 2009, TV Licence fee payer against ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ censorship wrote:"Most of us using the mobile internet"
What on earth is the "mobile internet", would that be the same internet as used everywhere but just accessed by mobile devices?...
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Comment number 3.
At 4th Sep 2009, Briantist wrote:Boilerplated: Yes, I think you have the definition there.
How about Moblogging "Posting to your blog via your mobile phone"
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Comment number 4.
At 5th Sep 2009, cping500 wrote:Please can fixed users have some better search too please.
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Comment number 5.
At 7th Sep 2009, mike_duke wrote:Are there any plans to bring access to blogs to ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ mobile?
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