Search is still the key to accessing Web content and applications. By search, I don’t just mean typing a word in Google to find a list of pages. I include the page hopping to find what you’re looking for, the filtering of information and other cognitive processes to arrive at the final result. This takes time, which is why it’s not free. Increasingly, the most important currency for professionals is time.

Search is even more cumbersome on a mobile. It needs to become more context-sensitive, which is easy to say, but difficult to implement. Context isn’t just about location. It includes what you’re doing, what you’re intending, what you’re thinking, who you’re with and a host of other contextual information. We’re a long way off from finding ways to describe and access context information, never mind utilising it for search. I wrote a detailed paper about this for Motorola and hope to include an independent treatment of the subject in my forthcoming book. It is clearly a key attribute of the future mobile experience.

A market will emerge for mobile ‘concierge’ search services that get utilised to perform search tasks, based on the premise that busy people are increasingly willing to spend money to save themselves time wherever possible - ‘buying back time’ is the key theme of various new approaches to what we used to call time management. Tim Ferris has led the way with his fascinating book 4-Hour Working Week.

The increasing number of ‘human intelligence’ marketplaces, like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Elance point already in the direction of viable micro-task exchange markets. What they need is a set of tools and services to extend these services easily to mobile.

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