Tag Archive for 'mobile search'

ChaCha mobile search tool has the human touch

Published
by
Fraser MacInnes
on January 4, 2008
in Applications
. 0 Comments

screenshot_06.jpgEver get fed up with communicating with a machine? At some point or another, most people have bemoaned the loss of personal touch and succinctness of interaction that has been wrought in the wake of mass automation. Even a very specific Google search can prove infuriating when the computer just seems willfully obtuse.

Well some forward thinking folks have decided to bring the human touch back by launching a new mobile search engine called ChaCha. The idea is that you send a query for info as an SMS to 242242 (which spells ChaCha on most phones) and wait for a human response with a specific reply to your question.

It works by having ‘Guides’ deal with your question personally who do the legwork of your search for you returning the most relevant results which depending on the popularity of the service could end up swallowing a whole heap of manpower. A good idea is a good idea however and ChaCha is definitely having a go at something a bit different. It’s free to try so if anyone fancies giving it a bash, do let us know how you get on.

(Via textually)



Boopsie offers shortcode mobile searching

Published
by
Chris Leonard
on December 10, 2007
in Mobile internet and Other stuff
. 0 Comments

untitled-1.jpgGoogle and Yahoo! quite clearly dominate Internet search engines but on mobile there’s more scope for a mobile-specific engine to stake a claim for itself.

We recently tried what we thought could be one of the easiest mobile search engines around Taptu, but now there’s another pretender to the crown – Boopsie.

Ignore the odd name, because Boopsie is something different. It uses Smart Prefix to search via short codes. Instead of having to type the whole search term on your phone’s fiddly keypad, Boopsie requires only the first few letters of each search. For instance, “Arctic Monkeys” would simply be “ar mo”.

The potential for incorrect searches is naturally high, but Boopsie reckons its users can reach over 90% of Wikipedia entries in only seven button presses.

To help, Boopsie has organised searches into specific categories like Wikipedia, sports scores, weather, local listings etc, to help make it easier.

Boopsie works on almost any Java handset and pretty much every mobile OS, and the free app can be downloaded from Boopsie.