I signed up several months ago for the beta of TapTu, without having a clue what it was for. One of the curses of being an early adopter is that you find yourself doing things like that. However, TapTu turns out to be an incredibly handy search tool. What is it? I’m glad you asked.
TapTu is NOT a download, it’s a url (sorry, can’t share it with you – yet). You will have it bookmarked in your mobile phone (I’ll put money on it). It’s a mobile optimized search tool, allowing you to easily find information about a topic from numerous sources. I believe the official mission statement is: a new kind of search engine for mobile phones which allows you to search and find really useful content in 10 clicks or less. I like that. Mobiles are obviously limited in their interaction with the web, so anything that makes it easier is a good thing.
So here’s a screenshot of the home screen. It’s a dead-easy search box.
If you scroll down a ways, you’ll find a user-settings menu where you
can customize things like the image size, number of results shown, and
things like that. Simple, but useful. I have Google’s mobile webpage
bookmarked on my N95, but seldom use it for several reasons. The first
is that the results are not mobile-oriented. Obviously my N95 can
handle full web pages, but it’s not really convenient, especially if I
wanted to find a piece of information quickly and efficiently. Sending
me to a full HTML page (or worse, Google’s "mobile optimized" version)
doesn’t help me find the information quickly, I end up wasting time
trying to navigate a full site on my mobile. That’s fine if I want
that, but I need options that are designed for speed.
Let’s try something rather obscure, Jerry Jeff Walker. He’s a little
known country singer from Austin (well, sorta). I type his name in and
click search. BOOM! I’m taken to the page shown here. Let’s look at all
the rich content I have at my fingertips now. First off, I have
photos/album art (since he’s a musician). I also have a Wiki, the song
(more on that in a moment), his MySpace page, and links to videos,
lyrics, pretty much anything I’d want to know about the Gypsy Songman.If you scroll down a bit, at the bottom of that screen, you can also get more results, filtered by type.
The music and video links offer you a sample (30s for music, 50s for
video) that’s converted for your device. I was able to stream the 50s
video that’s hosted on Myspace right on my N95. Pretty dern handy, if
you ask me. For one thing, it’s handy for trivia contests. I also
learned quite a bit from the wiki on Jerry Jeff. I knew he was born in
New York, but I didn’t know that Jerry Jeff Walker is just a stage name
(specially since his son is Django Walker).
TapTu is something new, but I’m already liking where it’s going. Rather
than just giving me a bunch of web links to sites mentioning Jerry Jeff
(or whatever topic) I get a good selection of relevant information from
various mediums. I’ll be working on a formal comparison against a few
mobile search options, watch this space.
