As a company, Do@ launched in March 2010 in San Francisco, but today at Tech Crunch Disrupt, the company has officially launched its product: the ultimate mobile search experience.
Mobile search and web-based search should be two entirely different experiences. Your interactions with the Internet on your phone are a very different process to that of your laptop. Just launched in the app store today, Do@, pronounced ‘Do-it’, is aiming to revolutionize the way you search the web on mobile by optimizing search through the app experience, providing results based on data direct from publishers.
To use it: Start typing a short query, which can be as simple as Justin Bieber or toilet paper. Instead of links, Do@ pulls in dozens of popular apps to answer your search query. For a movie query, it will pull apps like IMBD, Flixster and MovieClips. And it doesn’t matter if users have that app on your phone or not, so it’s a win for publishers too. The UI enables users to scroll through the results like they do with photos on their iPhone, with an interface aesthetically similar to Flipboard.
Search results are presented based on the ranking engine Social Radar, which lets users “heart” an app so that it appears closer to the top in search results. Social Radar also measures the apps the users’ friend likes, and even the preferences of a users’ friend’s friend.
I sat down with Ami Ben David the Co-Founder of Do@ to get a demo of the app and talk about how the Do@ mobile search experience will change people’s interaction with search as mobile becomes the dominant leader in accessing Internet.
“The accelerating growth of mobile means there is a tremendous need for search results delivered on-the-go to be as mobile-optimized, powerful, and exciting as mobile apps are,” said Ami Ben David, do@ Co-Founder. “We believe the best resources to answer users’ search queries are the publishers and app developers who create mobile applications and mobile-optimized web sites. Do@ provides a platform that enables direct communication between users and their trusted sources, delivering a search experience that is built for mobile.”
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