I’ll be honest I don’t know very much about search engines, a few years ago I printed out a copy of Larry and Serge’s Stanford paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and read it on a cross country flight for a job interview on a related subject… needless to say I didn’t get the job and I pretty much dropped any more digging on the subject.

But after attending last weeks MetaPlaces conference and listening to the various speakers, including one on the opportunities in mobile search and also a refresher on Sense Networks, the subject is back top of mind again.

The consensus at the conference seemed to be that the existing web search leaders will continue to be the leaders in mobile and there may only be some crumbs of vertical specialty mobile search left up for grabs for new upstarts. And the existing leaders certainly do seem to be innovative as heck in term of trying to infer local intent… I think if you go give Bing Mobile or Google Mobile a trial run for a local business related search, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Here is a quick chart with some of what I think are particularly significant differences between pointing an algorithm at a stack of static text web pages versus the more fluid movement happening between geographic spaces:

As always, comments and discussion are welcomed!