Lubna Dajani and David Harper invited me to participate in a panel session at Mobile Monday New York on April 28th. The subject was Mobile Analytics and Social Search. About 100 people attended the event in the gleaming Samsung Experience Center in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, and one of the attendees, David Berkowitz, liveblogged the session.

Several people posed me questions on mobile social search. Here are a couple of them, together with my answers.

Why can’t existing desktop search engines meet the mobile challenge?

Well, they are trying to meet the challenge, because there are 27m searches a day already on mobile. But this is just 2% of the volume of desktop search, something is wrong. There is too great an emphasis on showing PC web results on devices that can’t consume PC web pages very well.

How can marketers and SEOs take advantage of social search?

The truth is that today it is very difficult. But there are a couple of early initiatives underway that will change this. At Taptu, we have recently created a search API for mobile content site owners. Moblr, a European mobile social networking site, have integrated this API into their service, to give their users access to the huge range of free mobile content that is contained within the Taptu search engine index.

At Yahoo, the new open SearchMonkey initiative will let site owners bring in some aspects of social search, which may or may not be applicable to mobile.

While in New York, I couldn’t resist the $20 tourist ride to the top of the Empire State Building. The last time I did this was 29 years ago, during my first visit to Manhattan. This time I visited at night, and the cityscape was just as awesome.

We’ve just completed a first version of a Taptu Mobile Search API. It gives mobile site owners three main benefits:

• First, it will provide an easy way for mobile sites to get their content indexed by Taptu.
• Second, mobile sites will be able to present their content within Taptu search results as easy-to-browse, screen-sized summaries in the same way that Taptu does for all other content.
• Third, your mobile site will be able to access the Taptu engine to perform searches carried out by your users, creating a private search channel that shows only your content.

It uses the same high-performance, fault-tolerant clustered architecture as the main Taptu service, so it’s going to be super fast and super reliable. We’ve implemented this API using a standard SOAP-style interface, and we’re just beginning to trial it with mobile site owners. When we’ve got enough feedback from early users we will turn it into a full public API available directly from on www.taptu.com.

If you’re a mobile site owner and you’re keen to work with us on this, please contact me via Facebook or LinkedIn, or contact Vero via Facebook or Jaiku, or email us at api@taptu.com.