This article was published on December 4, 2012

Kickvox launches new iOS and Android apps to make mobile search “visually stunning”


Kickvox launches new iOS and Android apps to make mobile search “visually stunning”

With more people on mobile devices, one of the things that might weigh heavily on people’s minds is finding an efficient way to search for things they want. Sure, on the iPhone, you can go to the browser and do a query in Google (likewise on Android phones), but how often are the results going to be exactly what you want?

Are they being gamed so that they show higher in the rankings and earlier in the results? And how should the results appear on the phone?

Kickvox, a company that dedicates itself to “reengineering” mobile search, has launched its iOS and Android applications in an attempt to show smartphone users what it thinks mobile search should look and act like. Alan Nowogrodski, the company’s co-founder and CEO says that it’s a broken feature: “the search industry is conceivably the only industry that looks virtually the same as it did a decade ago, yet the platforms that we use to search the web have changed significantly.”

To that end, what Kickvox is offering is an app that has a “visually stunning” interface that was created specifically for the mobile device. Through its development, the company says that results will be displayed faster allowing for easier browsing and better navigation.

“Mobile users don’t want a laundry list of sites and cluttered text they need to squint in order to read; they want visually rich content that makes it easy to pinpoint what they need and move on,” Nowogrodski says.

Inside the app, Kickvox uses shortcuts and icons that are purpose-built for touch screen mobile platforms, drawing data from Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes and other services via dedicated apps. When a search is performed, the app automatically categorises listings into relevant groups, including shopping, music, Q&A, movies, reviews, educational and more.

If you look at what you normally would get through a search query on your mobile device, it’s basically the Google search results — simple, but with all text making it difficult for things to stand out and something that some might say is visually unappealing.

With Kickvox, the semantic web appears to be back.

➤  Kickvox – iOS | Android

  

Photo credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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