• by Shankar Gupta , July 27, 2005

As part of its continuing effort to attract more users, America Online will today bring its search services to Web-enabled mobile phone users, regardless of whether they have AOL accounts.

AOL plans to make both its Web search, powered by Google, and local search services, powered by Yellow Pages, available to mobile phone users. The local search service will be monetized by pay-per-call links sold by Ingenio; the paid listings will appear highlighted in yellow with phone numbers that users can call simply by clicking on them, while organic results will have phone numbers that users must manually dial.

One problem with Web-enabled search is that many mobile phones can't read all of the HTML coding that appears on sites. To cut down on unreadable pages, AOL will employ an algorithm created by InfoGin, an Israeli mobile technology company. InfoGin converts HTML sites into pages more easily read by mobile devices by stripping out Javascript, resizing graphics, and re- rendering the page. "It's not perfect by any strength of the imagination, but it does a great job on all but the most complex Web pages," said Ken Thomas, the senior project manager for AOL Mobile.

AOL mobile search additionally will filter results to provide a smaller number of hits for users on the go. "When we looked around at the way that search had been offered so far...one problem was that when you decided to search for something, you could always get back millions of hits, which is certainly difficult to go through on your phone," Thomas said.

In addition to filtering results, the search page is divided into three categories--Web search, local search, and a shopping search engine. The latter can provide in-store price comparisons.