Google Inc. continues to dominate the online-search space, but who will win in mobile — and how they’ll get there — is anybody’s guess.

The already crowded field of mobile-search providers got a little more packed last week as Proximic, a San Francisco- and Munich, Germany-based Internet-search firm, rolled out its first mobile application. The offering, which targets Apple Inc.’s iPhone, uses the device’s touchscreen and identifies blocks of text instead of the keywords most established engines focus on.

Proximic Agents, as it’s dubbed, allows users to enter dozens of words or highlight large blocks of texts from the Web in an effort to find the most relevant and similar results.

“The agent application has one core value proposition: we’re trying to give the user an easy and comprehensive way to find information fast,” explained Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper. “It plows through millions of RSS feeds to find relevant content. You can query the system with any length of text, and it still manages to find out the relevance” from those queries.

The 7-year-old company came to market two years ago amid giants such as Google, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., and earlier this year inked deals to supply its search technology to Yahoo Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com. And just as it faces dominant forces in the online-search world, it is jumping into an extremely crowded field of mobile search where pure-plays such as Go2, JumpTap Inc. and Medio Systems Inc. are vying for traction against the Internet titans expanding to wireless.

Outside the box

And while most of the players use the same keyword strategy that underpins the online-search world, Proximic and a few others are taking a different tack in mobile. ChaCha is gaining substantial traction — if not much revenue yet — using “human guides” to research queries and return results instead of algorithms. Mobile Content Networks is looking to the West after finding success in Japan with a “federated” offering that essentially queries multiple search engines to deliver answers. And many companies are experimenting with “context,” an ambiguous term that can take into account location, platform and even user behavior and profiles.

“Mobile search will move away from the generic style of searches seen on the fixed Internet to more personal services, in which local search will be the killer app,” according to a report released earlier this year by Visiongain. “Internet content on the mobile Web is improving, and this will increase the [quality of service] on mobile search, which will in turn drive the usage of mobile search. Local and social searches will be a trait in mobile search and this will differentiate the service from the fixed Internet and give mobile search a competitive edge.”

Proximic is already active in China — due largely to the fact that its technology is language-independent, focusing on characters and patterns rather than the words themselves — and while wireless may not play a huge role in its future, Pieper said the company plans to support other handsets.

Article modified Dec. 9 to include additional context.

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