Taptu, a search engine specializing in mobile searches, just announced that its users now generate more than 1 million searches a day, and that the search engine had about 3.4 million unique users in April. One of the most interesting aspects of Taptu is that it tries to only include mobile-friendly search results in its index. As Microsoft is revving up its mobile search efforts with Bing Mobile, and Google keeps on releasing tweaked versions of its mobile search, Taptu is obviously working in a very crowded market, but the company offers a number of interesting features that its competitors have yet to implement.
Lots of Users, But is it Any Good?
Of course, a search engine that doesn’t return good results is useless, no matter how good the interface, but Taptu’s search results are generally good. While focusing on sites that work well on mobile devices is great, it limits the number of results which can often be a disadvantage. Modern phones also tend to be rather good at displaying any web site you throw at them, so Taptu’s advantage here (if it really is one), might only be temporary.
Oddly, especially for a mobile search engine, Taptu doesn’t feature any maps in its search results and it doesn’t seem to optimize its search based on your location.
Taptu has a good number of very interesting features, though. You can, for example, choose if you want to be taken to a slightly stripped down version of a site it found, or if you want to see the full version of that site. Especially on older phones and slow connections, this can be a real advantage.
iPhone App Coming Soon
Taptu also announced that it is working on a native iPhone app, which should be available soon. Taptu heralds its iPhone app as the “world’s first search service specifically for touch devices and the touch web.” This does sound intriguing, but without being able to test drive the app, we will have to sit back and see if Taptu can live up to its promise. We do hope, though, that the app will fix some of the shortcomings of Taptu’s mobile site. The company already offers an iPhone app (iTunes link) that gives users access to an iPhone-optimized view of Wikipedia.
