Today OneRiot is excited to announce a partnership with Taptu, the leading mobile search engine. As of this morning, Taptu searchers will find realtime results within Taptu.com’s mobile-optimized search experience, signifying the first integration of realtime results by a mobile search provider.

Taptu is the first mobile company to make use of the OneRiot realtime search API, incorporating the web’s freshest, most buzzed about content into Taptu’s mobile touch-friendly interface. Mobile users can now search the realtime web or browse trending topics, fulfilling a need for people to discover realtime, socially-influenced content on the go – one of the most significant developments in mobile search to date.

We had lots of fun working with the Taptu team while bringing this alliance to life, picking up lots of fascinating things about mobile search in the process. It’s interesting territory – rapidly expanding, increasingly significant territory – and it’s more dependent on realtime information than anything before.

Fun facts about mobile search:

+ The majority of mobile searches originate from smartphones, a market that represents 15% of the handheld market (and that grew by over 105% in 2008)

+ With the advent of the iPhone, mobile search has grown by 5x in frequency

+ Mobile search requires a different version of optimization than desktop search, supporting a different set of desires and expectations. According to behavioral research, mobile searchers expect to be entertained as well as informed, and want to discover web pages that are optimized for mobile (many of the websites indexed by traditional search engines are not).

+ A full 41% of cell phone owners (smart or otherwise) say they fill in free time when they are traveling or waiting for someone by making phone calls, and many of these owners do so using search

These realities and more serve to confirm one of the most buzzed about revelations of the past few years: People are thinking of their mobiles as a portable computer, relying on their cell phones as a source of information, entertainment and sociability. But like we said, these on-the-fly information seekers are distinctly different than their desktop browsing counterparts. Sometimes, they’re searching for distinct pieces of information – for example, the phone number of a restaurant they’re hoping to make a reservation at – but frequently they have other goals in mind. Mobile search is more social, discovery-driven and experience sensitive than its predecessor - which is why its taken a new, specified engine like Taptu to make some sense of it all.

As we’ve chatted about before, realtime results help people find what’s happening, right now, for any subject. Not long ago, finding that fresh information required a steady perch at your desktop, but today that ‘nowness’ is in no way confined to a monitor. OneRiot believes that the mobile web is inherently suited for the fresh, buzzworthy events of the realtime web – in fact, it is frequently the very source of it - and we know that the future of mobile search is bright.

The Taptu/OneRiot partnership has brought a new level of accessibility to realtime search, allowing people on the go to find the news that matter most, right now. We know you’ll love the first result of our ongoing collaborations with Taptu, and we can’t wait to show you the rest in the coming weeks.

Learn more about realtime and mobile search with the Taptu and OneRiot Whitepapers:

Taptu Whitepaper
OneRiot Whitepaper

Taptu search with OneRiot results is available on the major touch devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, Nokia N 97 and 5800, and the Blackberry Storm 1. Read Taptu’s blog about the partnership here!