TapTu Mobile Searching - AWESOME
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.
Dude this is PHENOMENOL! Can’t wait until it’s out of beta. If there is anything that a smartphone is designed for it’s finding information quickly from anywhere. It’s the simplest tools that are the best!
Wow, thanks for the glowing review, Ricky!
I’m thrilled to see you like it, and can’t wait until we can take the wraps off for everyone else too. Still a bit of tinkering to be done behind the scenes, then we’ll be able to do the big reveal.
Again, cheers for the comments
wicked stuff indeed
Wow,really heplful website,it’s nice to see so many new things being made for symbian
Useful yes, but this (like other mobile serarch engines) would be best served by having a widget/native app that can be launched from any application on one’s device.
Looking forward to seeing what it will do, reminds me of 4INFO though.
Aug 20th, 2008 at 1:00 am
[...] you can directly enter a search, as well as pick your search engine : Wikipedia, Images and Taptu (read Ricky’s review) are available. You can also access the Categories and some nifty options. But the most awesome [...]