Go Mobile: The escape for local search engines?

Search engine is always one of the hottest trends in the Internet world. At China market, Baidu has defeated the giant Google to become the number one local search engine, and this has inspired some Vietnam competitors to do a similar thing, to grow up a "Baidu of Vietnam". However, they all meet many difficulties now, due to the tough competition from Google, as I mentioned in past articles [1], [2]. But with the launch of local 3G, will there be any changes?

Let's take a look at what 3G can shape our future. In recent days, I have been trying Mobifone 3G. It takes about 8.000VND for unlimited 1 day usage, 16.500VND for 3 days and 137.500VND for one month, you can find out more here. With one day unlimited usage, I could download hundreds of songs to my mobile phone, much better than the normal SMS download often take 15.000VND/SMS, not include the fee you have to pay for the GPRS data downloaded. So definitely, this will be the trend of future, when local mobile users become more intelligent and 3G connectivity becomes immensely popular soon.

So, what will be the most important tool to a local mobile user? I think mostly the search engine, since Vietnamese users are fond of downloading music, photo to their mobile. A good search engine will be the main gate to access to the mobile Internet entertainment world. As a result, all local search engines are now moving toward this 

Xalo.vn (http://m.xalo.vn) The company is now offering 10 services, some are free and some are not. For paid services, Xalo.vn require user to pay via SMS, by sending a SMS cost 15.000VND for 3 months subscription) 

Socbay.com (http://m.socbay.com/) The company is now offering 5 search services: Music, Photo, Local, Dictionary, Ads. The company also collaborate with Mobifone, to launch the common mobile search portal http://msearch.vn. Besides mobile web version, the company also has a J2ME version to run on normal mobile phones.

Google.com (http://www.google.com.vn) Google Mobile now offers a wide range of search via the mobile interface. However, they are still not popular as Google Web Search, and lacking music search is definitely a big disadvantage of Google. 

So if local competitors can run fast, I think they may achieve many advantages against Google. It is quite hard to believe, but remember that most of local users are now using mobile just for listening music, downloading photo, reading newspaper. A small program with some basic features would be good enough, especially if local search engines work together with mobile service providers like Viettel, Mobifone, Vinaphone... to deploy the app to end-users, then they will create some difficulties for the giant Google. So look forward to seeing the next local search war on mobile :)

Posted in: featured,it