Microsoft – Yahoo: Bad News For Mobile Search

By now you’ve probably heard about the Microsoft – Yahoo deal. Yahoo will shutter their search engine and instead source search results from Microsoft’s Bing. There are lots of details about advertising revenue share that I won’t bore you with. If you are interested in that sort of thing, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has a good summary. While probably necessary for Yahoo’s survival, I’m worried about the future of my favorite mobile search engine,  Yahoo’s oneSearch. What I … Continue reading

Build A Mobile Web Search Site Using Bing or Yahoo Data?

It looks like it’s  now possible for developers to create a web search engine on the cheap using data from at least two of the big three (Google, Yahoo,  Microsoft Bing) search engines.  Instead of having to build your own army of crawler bots and commanding them to index the mobile web, a prohibitively expensive and time consuming process, you can simply pass a  query in an API call to retrieve search results from at least two of the big … Continue reading

The New Yahoo Mobile Web Portal Is Live

Today at CTIA, Yahoo announced the availability of the new Yahoo Mobile.  It comes in the form of an iPhone app and as a mobile web site at new.m.yahoo.com. I’ve been playing with the web based version a bit and it’s pretty nice already and should be great once a few opening day bugs are ironed out. Yahoo Mobile is a very flexible and open web portal which allows you to add virtually any sort of content, including third party … Continue reading

Delicious.com Goes Mobile

Yahoo owned social bookmarking site delicious.com launched a mobile web version yesterday.  It’s at m.delicious.com.  The mobile site is a pretty basic read-only affair, it doesn’t even seem possible to add a bookmark using the mobile version.  What mobile Delicious does provide is a low bandwidth view of your bookmarks, inbox, tags, subscriptions, network and the top 10  URLs as defined by “Delicious Popular”.   You can browse your bookmarks by tag and search for a tag.  The site works well … Continue reading

CTIA: Netbiscuits’ Mobile Web Developer Challenge

Germany’s Netbiscuits seems to be one of the more prolific and successful mobile web development shops.  This year they built and are hosting three Yahoo Sports sites, March Madness, Beijing Olympics and the new Fantasy Football site launched last week.  In addition to Yahoo, Netbiscuits is used by eBay, AOL, Nokia, Land Rover, Germany’s BILD newspaper and Spiegel magazine, European TV conglomerate RTL, Japan’s toy and game company Konami and Sixt (a big European car rental company), 80% of the … Continue reading

CTIA: Yahoo Fantasy Football

Along with oneConnect and extending the BluePrint widget platform to allow the creation of standalone mobile apps and site Yahoo made another announcement at CTIA. It’s the mobile edition of Yahoo Fantasy Football (m.yahoo.com/fantasy). Fantasy sports leagues have a huge following around the world and especially in North America. The basic idea is that you form a league with your friends. Each participant owns one or more teams. The league holds a draft where each owner picks players for his … Continue reading

Avoiding Yahoo and Google’s Transcoders (When You Want To)

Transcoders, web services that convert full websites to a mobile friendly format, can be great.  If you are trying to use a site like The Economist‘s that doesn’t have a mobile edition on a phone with an, ahem, limited browser like a RAZR V3, a transcoder is the only way.  You can bring up Google on your RAZR, search for “The Economist”, click the first result and get something that will load on your phone and is readable if not … Continue reading