Recently IDG News Service asked Google’s Marissa Mayer about the “perfect search engine.” Here was the question posed: “What is the perfect search engine? If you had a magic wand and could create it, what would it look like? What would it do?”

Mayer replied: “It would be a machine that could answer that question, really. It would be one that could understand speech, questions, phrases, what entities you’re talking about, concepts. It would be able to search all of the world’s information, [find] different ideas and concepts, and bring them back to you in a presentation that was really informative and coherent.”

What Mayer may have unknowingly described is Siri, a “virtual personal assistant” that uses artificial intelligence to determine user intent and then match data or applications that can fulfill that intent. The company will launch its iPhone application soon and already has a deal with a “tier one” US mobile carrier. The NY Times offers background on Siri and some of the technology behind the system:

SRI International’s software venture, called Siri, is more ambitious, in that it allows users to speak or write natural-language requests into the device (“Find me a place to eat dinner tonight with Karen, reserve a table and put it on our calendars.”), which will complete the task independently and inform you when it is done.

In terms of long-term predictions, Siri is actually an easy bet. Dag Kittlaus, the company’s chief executive, said one of the four major carriers would introduce the service early next year, and he said it would also be available as an iPhone app. But over the next two years the technology should be able to complete a wider range of tasks.

I’ve seen Siri in action and found it impressive. The system is not perfect but it brings users closer to transactions and fulfillment of their objectives — at least in a range of use cases — than can Google on mobile devices today. It uses a voice interface to receive queries. You can use the keyboard if necessary but that’s entirely secondary to the experience. 

The way one interacts with it is “conversational” and “transactional” rather than providing a verbal version of a conventional search query. 

I moderated a panel at the recent Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco called “new directions in navigation and search.” The panel, among others, featured Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus. What became clear during the panel is that we’re going to see lots of innovation and change in mobile search and that the present version of the experience could well be regarded as Jurassic in only a few years as the unique attributes of the device (e.g., the camera) become input mechanisms and search tools. Augmented reality is also a part of this, although in its present form it’s fairly undeveloped and limited.

And, as another example of how far things could develop away from the current “query box and blue links” search paradigm,  look at the video demo below of “SixthSense” a “wearable gestural interface”:

There seems to be an explosion of “real-time” search engines on the PC. The space is very new, still fairly open and in my opinion the tools and sites are not yet all that useful. Almost exactly the same can be said of “augmented reality” (AR) in mobile.

From almost nothing about six months ago, there’s now an explosion of AR apps for Android and the iPhone. They’re cool, they’re novel but most of them are not that useful as a practical matter.

As I wrote previously, AR is a form of search. However the best AR apps incorporate more conventional methods of searching and discovery that don’t rely on the camera or use AR to complement their existing app (i.e., Yelp, Urbanspoon).

Indeed, Urbanspoon (now part of Citysearch/IAC) just released an app update that includes AR for the iPhone 3GS. Called “Scope” it shows a tab at the bottom of the screen that launches the camera-based experience. Hold the phone up and through the camera you see the popularity of restaurants and distance, indicated by the size of the circle (image below). If you point the phone toward the ground, you’ll get a traditional map instead. You can also manually locate yourself for greater precision (so that you can see the restaurants immediately near you) if GPS isn’t working well.

The iPhone (following Android) also recently saw the arrival of AR “browsers” Wikitude and Layar, which incorporate lots of third party data and services. And there’s also new AR “platform” WhereMark for the iPhone.

There are now at least a dozen apps that offer varying degrees of augmented reality through the camera lens. These tools generally work well as a way to discover information about locations immediately around you or to quickly learn more about a place or object immediately in front of you. However AR can be quite awkward in many instances and, at least at this point, is not an all-purpose substitute for more “traditional” mobile search.

In time AR will find its place — and it will — in the mobile universe. Like voice interfaces AR is a search and discovery tool that is uniquely tailored to the mobile handset and not simply imported from the PC. But interestingly, we’re also starting to see AR make its way onto the PC experience in some ways (in Google Maps for example).

If Bing can brand itself “decision engine” as a strategy to differentiate  from the leading “search engine” so can shopping comparison site TheFind. The latter is now calling itself a “buying engine” as a way to emerge from the anonymous sea of shopping search sites out there.

This morning a redesigned TheFind went live with a range of new features, including enhanced product search, coupon aggregation for 50 million products, review search, local inventory and beefed up information about online stores. Beyond a somewhat new look and feel, review search and coupon aggregation are the truly new content areas for the site, which claims to have indexed more than 350 million products from over 500,000 stores through crawling.

TheFind’s CEO Siva Kumar told me that the new site and content is aimed at fulfilling consumer needs at every stage of the buying cycle from research to where to purchase locally. (Local data are from Krillion and NearbyNow.) Among other capabilities, the new capacity to search and filter by coupons, sales or free shipping should prove to be very popular with consumers. (Ask not long ago launched coupon and deal search to capitalize on the hot coupons trend.)

Kumar emphasized the company’s consumer orientation and focus. He added that because of this consumer focus the site is right now under-monetizing vs. its potential, in marked contrast to the bulk of “shopping engines” that have become largely advertising vehicles for e-commerce merchants or search arbitrage sites.

Beyond major branded retailers such as Target, BestBuy and so on, there are only a couple of true shopping “destinations” online, Amazon being one of them. A relatively new generation of shopping sites, such as TheFind or Wize, are trying to move beyond the me-too shopping experience of most comparison engines and appeal to consumers with content, comprehensiveness or features that make them top-of-mind destinations — rather than “one-off” visits through SEM or SEO links in Google. Meanwhile Bing has staked out shopping search as one of its four “strategic verticals.”

TheFind says that it now has 13.5 monthly unique visitors in the US and counting. Beyond the new site, TheFind has for some time had a nicely done iPhone app:

This mobile-PC shopping connection will grow more important over time as consumers with internet-capable handsets bounce back and forth between online and local stores, comparing prices, reviews and local inventory data online and in mobile.

Online comparison shopping is a relatively mature “vertical” but it’s ripe for (I won’t say “disruption”) change and evolution, especially as mobile becomes a more significant part of the experience for consumers.

Aardvark, which can be described variously as a “social search engine, “help engine” or “answer community,” has launched an iPhone app. It was many months in the making according to co-founder Max Ventilla. And with it, Aardvark arrives on what may be its breakthrough platform, helping to introduce the service to the mainstream — or at least iPhone users.

The site offers many entry points where users can ask questions: Vark.com, Facebook, Twitter, IM. However, the bulk of questions come in via IM currently. In addition, you can choose to receive responses via email. Until now Aardvark has been obscure to many people. But the iPhone app should make clear what the site is and does as well as make use cases fairly self-evident. Mobile was always one of the primary scenarios for the service, as a mixture of mobile search and directory assistance 2.0.

According to Ventilla the majority of questions people ask are answered within five minutes. That is consistent with my experience of the service as well. Ventilla said that Aardvark built the iPhone app not because the company saw growing mobile usage overall but specifically because its “power users” were accessing the site through mobile phones.

“People really like connecting with friends over the iPhone,” explained Ventilla. “We designed the product with utility as the primary driver, but it has a real social dimension on the iPhone.” That is further magnified if you sign in to the iPhone app with Facebook Connect.

Several months of testing with an alpha group of power Aardvark users resulted in several modifications, one of which was the removal of a planned voice/speech interface. “We built it but the added complexity scared some people away,” he told me. So they’re deferring the introduction of speech until later.

The iPhone app also comes with push notifications. Indeed, Ventilla told me that the app they built wouldn’t have been possible before the iPhone software 3.0 update, which includes push notifications among other features. And there are features that will be added to future versions of the iPhone Aardvark app that build on the 3.0 software’s capabilities.

The iPhone app becomes a kind of mobile archive for all your history, responses and recommendations. You can thus access that past restaurant or hotel recommendation from the iPhone app. This PC-mobile connection allows people to use both sides of the service: ask a question from home or office and retrieve the answer on the iPhone app later — on the go. This capability should contribute to its popularity.

Aardvark’s “secret sauce” is the machine intelligence that regulates, routes and mediates the delivery of questions and answers to the community. The marketing challenge, however, is to grow that community and usage accordingly. I believe the iPhone app will help do that. If so, once Aardvark gains increasing usage a kind of momentum will take over where users get answers more quickly, which will reinforce usage in turn.

If Aardvark were to succeed as a social mobile search engine it could become a primary or preferred tool for users seeking restaurants, things to do or other types of recommendations or answers “on the go” — the equivalent of word of mouth. It’s not a replacement for Google but for many queries and questions it will be easer to use than conventional search on mobile devices, which is still awkward and challenging in most respects.

This morning, TechCrunch reported that Flickr’s iPhone app has finally made it to the iTunes Store. It is free and can be downloaded by clicking here. I gave the app a quick go, and I really think it was done exceptionally well.

Here is a walk through, screen by screen.

The app icon is plain and simple:

When you load up the app and past the start screen, images are displayed on the front page. But the images has slow motion to them, as they pane in and out between other images. If you are logged in, you get images from your friends as well. Here is a screen cap of that page:

From here, you have several icons and buttons you can click on. The most prominent is the search box at the top. I will explore each of the features below.

Here are the search options, including the ability to search “all uploads,” “from your contacts,” and “your photostream.” There is no auto-complete, plus, even though it does ask for your location, it does not give you the option of seeing photos in your location:

Here are the search results:

The “recent” button takes me to see recent “activity” or “uploads.” Here is a screen shot of my recent activity, showing recent comments left on my photos and recent favorites by others on my photos:

Here is a look at the recent “uploads” from my account:

The “You” button shows me my most recent pictures on Flickr:

Clicking on the top right icon will change the view from thumbnails to list view:

When you click on an image, you can see the image picture in larger format, more details about the photo, plus you can email it, skip forward or backwards or comment on the photo. Plus you can click on the image or click on the image tags:

Here is the comment form:

Here is that same image in the larger image viewer:

Here is a look at the tag search results:

To add a picture, click on the camera icon at the top right and you are given these options:

The “i” button takes you to learn more about the app, privacy policies and also gives you the option to login or log out at the top left of this screen:

A version of local search has existed on Twitter for some time: asking your followers for local recommendations about places to stay, things to do and so on. One can also use Twitter search itself, though it’s very hit and miss in terms of the quality of results. And there are also the third party search engines that use the Twitter API. Yet those typically produce the same uneven results.

But in what is a first (to my knowledge) Idearc’s Superpages has brought true local search to Twitter through Twitter.com/sp411. Twitter users can now conduct searches of the Superpages database and get results as direct messages on  Twitter to their local queries. (They can also retweet and share them, which makes it that much more interesting.)

Here’s the process:

1. You follow sp411 and then it will automatically follow you a few seconds later
2. You then send a direct message to sp411 (”d sp411″) with a query and location. Example: pizza in Seattle, “d sp411 pizza Seattle”.
3. Results will appear in an all the Twitter notification places (email, SMS and direct message).

Here’s what it looks like:

Just a couple of seconds after the direct message is sent you see something like this:

If you click through on any of these links you are taken to a business profile page on Superpages’ site:

After the initial set up process, in which you follow sp411 and it follows you, the service proves to be quite useful especially if you’re looking for a specific business phone number or address. It’s also an example of Superpages proactively taking its data and local search capabilities out to where users are, not unlike what many companies have been doing for some time on Facebook.

And in case it isn’t self evident, this also makes Twitter/sp411 a local-mobile search tool as well.

There are a couple of other Twitter bots out there but this is the first local search tool on Twitter. I would imagine, as people see and start to use this, we’re going to see a bunch of vertical and other search tools employing similar functionality. And as they start to emerge they make Twitter a much more interesting and useful site.

We’re really just at the beginning of the era of “mobile search.” Even what we think of as “search” will be dramatically altered by innovations in mobile. In this first phase the transfer of what might be called the “query box” (and related links) into mobile is complete. In time, however, we many even come to see that image — the white box with the search button to the right — as a kind of metaphor for something more intangible (i.e., directed intent) that can be fulfilled in a variety of ways.

Google is already the dominant player in search on mobile devices and certainly on smartphones, the most active category of mobile users. (It remains to be seen how the Microsoft-Verizon “default” deal will affect the market as it rolls out.) However, recognizing the challenges and limitations of manually keying in queries on mobile devices, the major engines all have voice interface/input options:

• Google (uses its own speech recognition technology)
• Yahoo (uses Vlingo for mobile oneSearch)
• Microsoft (uses Tellme, which it acquired in 2007)

Voice as a search tool will only continue to get better. Tellme recently released survey results that show favorable consumer attitudes toward voice on mobile devices. As the services become more reliable and accurate — they’re already very good — consumers will increasingly use them to retrieve content and information because they’re faster and easier than manually keying in queries.

Another less obvious form of search involves mobile apps on the iPhone and Android, and other smartphone platforms increasingly, which show the closest gas station, ATM or cafe “nearby” using the phone’s built in location awareness capabilities. Yelp and AroundMe on the iPhone are just two examples among a number of apps:

Google itself has an app on Android called Places Directory, which is almost identical and de-emphasizes traditional “search.” But these apps, which don’t actually require any query to be entered, are just as much “search” in terms of the user’s mindset as manually inputting “sushi, new york” in Google.com on a PC.

Another step away from the query box, but still search, is represented by some of the product search tools and services now on smartphones, such as as the Amazon or ShopSavvy apps for Android devices.

These are two examples of a growing trend involving the camera as search tool or input device. They allow you to take a picture using the phone’s camera or use a barcode scanner through the camera to obtain price information, reviews and, in the case of ShopSavvy, where to buy the item locally. The mobile version of Google Product Search (on Android) offers barcode scanning as well. Similarly, use of the camera to capture QR codes to gain additional information can be seen as a kind of search, although it starts to get a bit fuzzy in my expanded definition (”directed intent”) because users may be responding to a call to action and not necessarily actively looking for something.

Yet a further step away from the query box on mobile devices comes in the form of “augmented reality.” Augmented reality apps are starting to pop up on smartphones: Layar, TwitARound and several others are in development. Most recently a company called Acrossair in the UK has developed an augmented reality app for the iPhone. It helps find the nearest underground stop and related information about routing.

As people direct their cameras to find the nearest tube station or, in a future app, to get reviews about a restaurant across the street, they are “searching” for information — albeit by other means. This and some of the other methods described above provide faster, richer or more immediate ways to get information and content than would otherwise be accessed through a traditional query box and related links.

Stepping back, we can start to see how “search” on mobile devices will diversify and broaden beyond the narrow way we tend to think of it today. In this broader world of directed intent that can be fulfilled in a number of ways, depending on the situation and the item or need in question, we move beyond the search box. And if “mobile search” already seems to be locked up by Google, this broader landscape that uses location-awareness, barcode scanners, image recognition and augmented reality is wide open.

A new report finds that mobile search and answers service ChaCha beat Google and Yahoo’s voice search tools in terms of overall accuracy and reliability across a range of query types in a controlled study. The study was conducted by Albright Communications/MSearchGroove in January of this year.

The report, which can be downloaded from the ChaCha site, was sponsored by ChaCha but the authors said, “While ChaCha sponsored the study, it was fully removed from the planning, testing, analysis, and reporting of this work.” The methodology was very specific and relatively elaborate. I summarize it below.

Both Google Voice Search and Yahoo oneSearch with Voice (powered by Vlingo) use automation for voice search. ChaCha uses humans to interpret voice queries, which are submitted through an 800 number: 1-800-2-ChaCha. Queries can also be submitted via text or online.

Here are the bottom line findings from the report:

Source: Albright Communications/MSearchGroove

Here’s how the two categories were defined:

• Natural language queries: queries submitted as questions using normal conversational syntax
• Keyword queries: queries seeking the same results as the natural language queries but reduced to the least number of keywords . . . necessary

What the table and findings above show is that in a “natural language” context, ChaCha was substantially better than Google and somewhat better than Yahoo/Vlingo. In a keyword query context the results are somewhat closer, but ChaCha still comes out on top.

One might expect this result given the involvement of human beings at ChaCha vs. pure automation with the others. From a pure user experience perspective, putting aside the back end, the report finds that ChaCha offers greater accuracy and reliability than either search engine when it comes to voice input.

The methodology:

All searches were performed by a single individual on the iPhone 3G. Here’s an abridged but otherwise verbatim description of the methodology used by the report’s authors:

To assess overall performance of the voice-enabled search services in a typical range of use cases and scenarios, we created 18 queries representative of mobile search usage and trends.

The queries covered search categories considered common in the mobile environment, such as navigation, directions, local information, general information on timely topics, and specialized or unusual long- tail topics. We included specific queries that represent the most popular mobile search terms in 2008, based on mobile search data publicly reported by AOL and Yahoo, as well as social queries. We did not include transactional queries . . . associated with downloading music and applications . . . and purchasing goods and services via a device.

Microsoft’s Tellme and Nuance Voice Control were not included in the study.

This Friday, I was one of the million people to get a new iPhone 3GS. After getting through my activation issues I had some time to test out the new search feature on the iPhone, named Spotlight (from Apple OS).

With the new iPhone, you can have an unlimited number of applications, so finding those applications, including finding data in the core Apple iPhone applications, can sometimes be a struggle. Apple hopes that the new iPhone Spotlight search feature will ease the problem of finding things on your iPhone. Here is a quick how to with the iPhone search feature.

(1) Accessing Spotlight search on your iPhone:

You can access the search feature on your iPhone in three ways. You can slide the screens from right to left until, so that you move the home screen to the right. Or you can click the home button twice and it will activate the Spotlight feature on your iPhone.

(2) Search on Your iPhone:

After you launch the Spotlight feature, a search box comes up, with a keyboard. You can begin typing your query into the box and Apple will show search results categorized by application. Here are some screen shots showing how Apple is searching through:

• Application’s by first, last or company name
• Mail by to, from and subject lines
• Calendar items by event titles, invitees, and locations
• iPod by music (songs, artists, and albums) and the titles of podcasts, video, and audiobooks
• Notes, the full text of notes

Clicking on the search results will open them in their native application.

(3) Customizing Spotlight Search for iPhone:

You can also customize the search results that Spotlight returns. You can specify which applications are searched and the order in which they’re searched. To do so, go to Settings on your home screen, click on “General” and then click on “Home.” Then scroll to the bottom and click on “Search Results.” Yes, Apple hides the search preferences deep down in there. Then you can reorder or uncheck the applications you want searched. Here is a screen capture:

To reorder the search results, just place your finger on the horizontal bars on the right of the application and drag them up or down.

Mobile search engine Taptu has just launched a free iPhone app (”alternative search machine”). It’s the first iPhone-specific search engine but Taptu has been doing mobile search for some time. According to the company the engine crawls the web and indexes “iPhone friendly pages” that are optimized for the device. The index is much smaller than a conventional search engine but “growing every day” according to Taptu.

It offers “preview cards” that create a very Palm Pre-like experience. You flick or horizontally scroll through preview pages (showing mostly real-time images of the sites) and then touch/click to go to the source page. There are no links in search results accordingly. Here’s a video showing how it works:

There’s also a cascading menu that allows for related searches or refinement by content source with a single touch.

In a related bit of news comScore and AdMob put out data today from a survey that involved roughly 7,300 US consumers (ages 13 and older) on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The study revealed demographic differences between the groups, but the most important and striking finding released showed that a substantial minority of the survey respondents (40+ percent) are going online with their mobile devices more often than through a PC.

While this group arguably represents the “bleeding edge” (to use the cliche) of the mobile market, this behavior can’t be ignored by advertisers. As we argued during the SMX Advanced panel on mobile PPC, you’ve got to experiment with mobile today to understand it — because there may be a day when there are more searches on mobile devices than on the PC.

That’s already true in selected developing nations according to Yahoo. I’ve got a little more on the AdMob data on LocalMobileSearch.