{"id":179,"date":"2006-10-15T22:00:57","date_gmt":"2006-10-16T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=179"},"modified":"2020-09-25T09:51:56","modified_gmt":"2020-09-25T16:51:56","slug":"sensis-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/179\/","title":{"rendered":"Sensis Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Update: wap.sensis.com.au is giving me 403 (Forbidden) errors, however mobile.sensis.com.au seems to working with the same content. I’ve changed the urls in this article to the mobile… variant.
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Sensis is one of the many brands belonging to Australian fixed and mobile telecommunications and Internet giant Telstra<\/a> (Wikipedia<\/a>). The Sensis brand is used for Yellow and White pages directories both online and mobile and for an online web search engine, www.sensis.com.au<\/a> – “The search engine for Australians”. Sensis search’s default behavior is to return sites, products and services of interest to Australians. This is a subtle distinction from the Australian versions of Google and Yahoo which return global results by default with Australian only results being an option.<\/p>\n

Sensis Mobile search (mobile.sensis.com.au<\/a>) is in beta and offers local, mobile web, people, images and Wikipedia searches. The local and people searches are Australian Yellow and White page searches and are probably mainly of interest to Aussies. But I’m excited that the local search may be a true location based search (LBS) i.e., able to detect your phone’s location using either GPS or tower location. I’m basing that on the message I got when doing a local search, “A location for your phone could not be determined. Please enter the address to search around”. I’m in San Francisco and not a Testra subscriber so I wouldn’t expect them to be able to find my phone. LBS is pretty rare outside of Japan but is something I think has enormous potential. A major carrier like Testra implementing it may portend LBS roll-outs around the world.<\/p>\n

For non-Australians, the mobile web search is probably the most interesting Sensis feature. It uses FAST’s<\/a> search engine. I’ve written<\/a> about FAST, one of the pioneers of searching the mobile web. FAST developed and operated Alltheweb.com, a web search engine which at one time had a larger database than Google. In 2003, FAST sold Alltheweb to Overture which in turn was bought by Yahoo. From 2001 to 2003 FAST offered\" mobile.alltheweb.com which I always found vastly superior to Google’s mobile search in returning relevant results. Since 2003, FAST has sold a white label mobile search which is used by some mobile operators as the default search on their portals. Unless your operator is using FAST you haven’t find it on the mobile web lately. Telstra’s use of FAST give us a new opportunity to compare it with Yahoo and Google’s mobile search.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Telstra doesn’t offer a transcoded web search like AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo or Google. Which is fine with me as I believe that true mobile web sites give a much better user experience than algorithmically mobilized PC sites.<\/p>\n

Like Sensis web search, the mobile version defaults to finding Australian results. The toggle for switching to global sites is on the results page – you have to see the Australian results first, select global and then re-search. Inconvenient, but I’m sure it’s a selling point when approaching Australian advertisers. I tried a few comparison searches between Yahoo, Google and Sensis mobile searches with the following results.<\/p>\n