Today we are launching the Taptu search app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For us it’s the culmination of a 6 month effort to create a new kind of search experience that’s optimised for touch devices like the iPhone.

This search experience starts from scratch with a new mobile search index – an index of as many touch-friendly Web pages as our crawlers can find. By touch-friendly we mean not only a Web page that is optimised for mobile but also one which is easy to navigate with your finger without pinching, scrolling or zooming contortions. (We’ve talked in depth about this concept of touch-friendly search in our recent white paper “Exploring the Touch Friendly Web”)

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen an exponential growth in the number of touch–friendly Web sites. They’ve multiplied more than 10-fold (Taptu estimate) as site owners begin to focus more and more on building their mobile audiences. Some are doing this in anticipation of an expected surge of e-commerce activity on mobile phones (the same surge that has already happened in Japan and South Korea). Touch phones with their bigger screens, better browsers and all-you-can-eat data plans are where this wave is going to hit first in Western markets.

It’s hard for users to explore the touch-friendly Web. The well-known search engines take you to desktop site results, sometimes auto-transcoding them for your phone. Start-up players have indexed the older-style mobile sites designed for phones with their smaller screens and their keypads. But until today nobody has offered a search engine especially for the touch-friendly Web.

Our touch-friendly index is still young and growing by leaps and bounds, but it’s now big enough – 3m+ pages – to be really useful. It’s available for you to play with right now. Just download it from the Apple App Store onto any iPhone or iPod touch. We’re keen to get your feedback, so please let us know what you think.  Email iPhone [AT] taptu.com, @taptu on Twitter or use the feedback forums you’ll find in the About section of the App.

And watch out for updates and other new developments from Taptu coming soon.

[the full press release is available here]

Links:

• Try the App now : take me to App Store
• Follow Taptu on Twitter: http://twitter.com/taptu
• Join Taptu’s Facebook group: http://bit.ly/woxVg
• See Video of the Taptu app: http://tinyurl.com/ktkg4p

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Company News, Events and conferences, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.