Mobile search is somewhat up for grabs, though Apple’s Siri and Google’s general dominance will make it harder for a start-up to make a dent. What Everything.me does is shortcuts.

The service, which originally launched under the inscrutable name Do@, is currently available as an HTML5 mobile Web app. It shortcuts users directly to results that are localized, personalized and mobile-optimized.

So if you searched for “The Hunger Games,” for instance, you’d see a set of icons that take you directly the movie’s Wikipedia page, reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, trailers on YouTube, iTunes soundtrack downloads, and Fandango tickets. It’s also quick to find stuff like nearby ATMs, gas stations, or even Foursquare friends checked in within a four-mile radius. The idea is to save time and clicks on mobile.

The site is full of suggested content and searches, so it feels more like a mobile Web portal than a search engine in the style of Google.

Everything.me is based in Tel Aviv, but currently focused on the U.S. market — with native iOS, Android and Windows Phone versions in development.

The two-year-old company has more money in the bank than it has users. It now has $12.5 million from investors including Horizons and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and some tens of thousands of beta testers.

But, after Google decided that it wanted to be the Google of mobile search, Medio found itself too small to compete on either the algorithmic or ad side.

So the Seattle company hunkered down and plotted a second act. The once-loquacious startup went silent, scaled back from more than 100 employees to around 60 and slowly started building back its business around the recommendation engine that had formed a key part of its search engine.

These days the company is looking to sell access to that engine to phone makers and operators who want to use it to help figure out which services and products to pitch to their customers. The need is particularly acute when it comes to trying to sell mobile apps, of which there are tens of thousands.

“The problem is people don’t know they are there,” Medio co-founder and CTO Brian Lent told Mobilized. “There’s a discovery problem.”

It is a widely recognized problem in the industry, with many companies aiming to attack it from different angles–some by pitching their own app stores, others by pitching advertising options and still others, like Medio, by trying to help understand user interest.

Medio is announcing later on Thursday that its services have been widely adopted by T-Mobile, a longtime customer of Medio’s. Lent said the carrier has actually been using the analytics services for more than a year, but that the company wanted to wait until it could demonstrate results before going public.

Since taking over powering T-Mobile’s Web2Go service in June 2010, Lent said that the company has been able to help T-Mobile triple its number of sessions per user, while offering significantly faster response time as well as reducing the amount of data sent between handset and network by 40 percent.

Medio’s engine can help suggest which apps a user might be interested in based on their past purchases, location and other information. It can also suggest what other items to pitch, such as wallpapers or ringtones, or even a different rate plan. The Medio technology is also designed to make it easy for a phone buyer to have a device customized with their favorite apps, sites and news feeds.

While many are attacking the app discovery issue, Lent comes armed with some serious technical chops, having worked alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as early Yahoo employees at Stanford’s computing labs in the 1990s. He had the chance to join both companies very early on, but passed.

We’ll also see what they have to say about the Yahoo search partnership and its efforts to catch up with Google (and trip them up with antitrust headaches).

Liveblog

Okay. I’m onsite and nearly caffeinated. Yes, there are donuts, but Mobilized is going for the savory option.

10:03 am: Still waiting for things to get started here.

10:04 am: Microsoft search engineering head Satya Nadella comes out. “Okay, let’s get this thing underway.”

10:06 am: First up, some momentum stuff. Share is at 11.8 percent per comScore numbers released yesterday, up another 0.2 percent from October. Overall up 48 percent since launch. “We’re very, very happy with that growth.” Now over 90 million users, but the big deal, he says, is more heavy searchers. “We never had the fans of Bing and the heavy users,” Nadella says.

10:08 am: Nadella says Bing is still getting a larger percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds than its share of searchers as a whole.

10:09 am: “These are footholds that we have in the marketplace,” Nadella says.

10:11 am: Continued focus on specialized verticals (like travel, music, health, image search etc). Overall, such searches account for five percent of all queries, but specialized search makes up of 10 percent of Bing’s searches.

10:12 am: Partnerships: Yahoo is obviously the big one, but Nadella shows slide with Facebook, Twitter, Verizon., BlackBerry, Apple, Android, Foursquare and other logos.

There ave been 5.5 million downloads of the iPhone app.

Nadella says the toolbar deals are also important: They just give us a shot at acquiring the users. They have another one coming with Conduit. Also, they are now at least an option on iPhone and Firefox.

10:16 am: Nadella says the engineering team is focused on three areas, beyond the “arms race” of overall search quality–increasing the visual organization, task-centered nature and social elements of search.

“We’re neck and neck in terms of search quality and we are able to maintain it,” Nadella says.

10:18 am: Lots of talk about the ins and outs of search tech. Nadella says Microsoft has moved from a “neural net” approach to “boosted decision trees.” (No idea what that means.)

10:22 am: Effort to make search more social is important, but just beginning. “This is a journey we are at the very beginnings of,” Nadella says, but says social will change search in terms of how results are discovered, formulated and answered.

10:24 am: Nadella is talking about the importance of visual highlighting to call out various results as well as boosting interactivity, such as including forms within results so users can take action.

Still waiting for any new stuff, but we’re told it’s coming.

Nadella says the company has broken down a list of the tasks people are trying to do when they are trying to do more than just navigate to a particular site.

“We have a pretty granular understanding just looking at the query stream of what people are trying to get done.”

Microsoft has broken it down to some 150 categories, but here are some of the top ones: 4.6 percent of searches are music related, 1.8 percent clothing and shoes, 1.6 percent consumer electronics, 1.1 recipes, 1.3 percent home furnishings.

10:29 am: On to some new stuff.

New image search launching today, but first Microsoft is talking about visual search for things like finding movies and giving direct answers for some new types of queries.

10:31 am: Microsoft is talking about any sort of non-search result as “answers.”

In one case, an “answer” for the query “let’s make a deal” would be video episodes of the game show.

But Microsoft says that automatically putting it at the top is not necessarily best. What the company says it should do instead is put it below the first two results, such as the show’s homepage, which get more clicks than the video.

10:35 am: Also when a user searches flights from Denver to Las Vegas in June, Microsoft pre-populates the fields in a flight search with a guess at the dates, in this case the first weekend in June.

10:38 am: New image search represents first major changes in a year. Biggest shift is white space is gone with just a ton of tiles of images, with some categories at the top.

For example, search “Casablanca” and you get an option for the city in Morocco, another for the movie, a third for the style of wedding dress and another for the Casablanca Lily flower.

10:40 am: On to shopping. Quadrupled the number of products in its database.

10:43 am: Bing is adding a new focus on places as “destinations” with all the potential content from booking a flight or hotel to maps and attractions.

Which is nice, because I’m ready to go on a vacation right about now.

They use weather data to show times to go to and times to avoid a particular place.

10:45 am: Microsoft is beefing up event listings with partnership from FanSnap and other partners. You get ticket info, diagram of stadium, etc.

10:50 am: Back to social. Nadella says search can change by using one’s social graph to influence search results.

First example, you will start to see when your Facebook friends “Like” a page that is in search results.

For now, such results will only come up fairly infrequently, but Nadella says it will be a big deal when you do see pages that your friends have liked.

Search allows the data your friends share on Facebook to come to you when you actually want the information.

“In a way you are taking your friends with you,” says Microsoft’s Paul Yiu.

An example is when you are shopping for a product or going to visit a place–that’s a time when you really want to know what your friends think.

(Seems pretty cool, but wondering just how infrequently this will show up.)

10:57 am: Another example Yiu gives is a search one might do at 3 am for what will make your baby stop crying. There are lots of results, but one that your friend likes might be worth trying first.

11:00 am: Bing is also using one’s Facebook social circle to rank results in people search–i.e., if you have a friend in common, it will rank that “John Doe” higher than one you don’t know.

11:01 am: Nadella is back to talk about local and maps and how that integrates with mobile. Behind him Blaise Aguera y Arcas is pulling out several phones to do a demo. (And they look like iPhones.)

11:03 am: Aguera y Arcas takes the stage to show some changes coming to maps, first on the desktop. He notes the recent shift away from putting its most powerful map features on a Silverlight-powered site. Now it is moving that all to an HTML5-based site that needs no plug-ins.

11:07 am: Bing is bringing the “tasks” concept to searches within maps. A search for a restaurant now brings up not just a map, but more info on the eatery and also the ability to make reservations via OpenTable.

11:09 am: Aguera y Arcas switches to the iPhone. Shows how people can add their own panoramas to maps using a cellphone.

11:13 am: iPhone demo over 3G is going really slow. Aguera y Arcas asks how many of the reporters in the room are using 3G.

11:15 am: Although its going painfully slow, looks like Bing app starts to recognize a restaurant search and pops up options like types of cuisine and price. The goal is to save keystrokes.

Other options are things like get a map, make a reservation, menus, etc.

Still R-E-A-L-L-Y S-L-O-W.

“This bandwidth situation is really going to suck for what I have to demo next.”

He switches to a first-person StreetSide view, but all we see are dots.

“This is so sad,” Aguera y Arcas says, lamenting that we aren’t able to see all the cool stuff. There does seem to be some new StreetSide view stuff on the iPhone app that could be neat, assuming it runs faster on the street than inside this demo room.

11:23 am: We’ve reached a new low. “Close your eyes and imagine….” Aguera y Arcas says, and then describes what the app would do if we could see it.

11:23 am: And they have switched to Wi-Fi. “This is so exciting,” Aguera y Arcas says. Now he’s going back to StreetSide. “That’s so much nicer.”

As for directions, Bing now has bus directions with schedule info in addition to driving and walking directions. “It’s about time,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for this one myself.”

Another feature reminds you to do something when you reach a certain place, like call someone or check-in to FourSquare or Facebook.

11:29 am: Aguera says we are in Search 2.0–where you do more than just search and get results.

Image search is an example. Shows the coming ability to search for something by using a camera to start a search. Basically you can shoot a picture of a page and use any of the terms there to start searching (It uses character recognition in the background).

Questions and Answers

11:32 am: How big a deal is Google Instant?

“We are absolutely studying Google Instant,” Nadella says. Says they could match it. It’s a question of whether it makes task completion easier. “Is it a value or a distraction?” Doing studies and so far Microsoft’s research says it is mixed at best.

“It’s not a game changer. It’s a nice feature at best.”

He hedges a bit on whether it is something Microsoft needs to match.

11:39 am: Mobile features were demoed on iPhone. So when will they come to Windows Phone 7 and other platforms?

Nadella says they now have software for most major phone operating systems, including Android.

“The different devices have different schedules,” he says.

11:42 am: And we’re out of here….Thanks for tuning in.

Fourfold growth in a single year. An astonishing increase, though inevitable given the rapidity of growth we’ve seen in mobile recently. And great news for Google (GOOG), for which mobile search is already big business. By Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s estimate, Google Mobile revenue will exit 2010 at a $500MM net revenue run rate.

Gabriel Stricker, Google’s Director of Search Communications kicks things off by noting that the company will be sharing a number of new developments that cater to the growing demands of its users. With that, Udi Manber takes the stage to offer a big-picture overview of search.

Manber says what Google does is the new “rocket science.” Search has to be fast, relevant, and fresh, he explains. But even that’s not enough. The real goal is to solve users’ problems. If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If the content is there but in a language the user doesn’t speak, that’s our problem. If the Web is too slow, it’s our problem. Manber offers a few examples of how Google works to address these challenges: real-time data, translation, etc. With these services nailed down, he says, Google can move on to the more important task of working on “understanding.”

Manber invites Pat Riley, senior search quality engineer, to the stage to talk a bit about Google’s “did you mean” link. Lots of people use the link, Riley says, and Google has been working to improve it. Called “spellmillion,” the project provides not only related results for a misspelled query but for alternate ones as well (think labor as in “work” and labor as in “pregnancy”). But it requires Google to process multiple searches for a single query and demands a lot of processing power.

Riley notes that the project has been somewhat contentious because it also potentially questions user intent. He offers the example of “Macy Ray.” Some users might be searching for “Macy Gray,” the singer, others for a person actually named “Macy Ray.” How do you address those two potential queries on a single search results page?

Riley is followed by Engineering Director Scott Huffman, whose subject is mobile search. Huffman starts things off with a few truisms. Mobile search is often local. It should be easy to use. Effortless. And it should provide all that Google has to offer. Huffman notes that this is quite a task since Google must optimize its search for different mobile experiences and different user interfaces: Google’s own Android, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, etc. Some of these platforms require gestures–touch, swipe–others use a keypad. All must provide access to the Web and the mobile Web–sites that have been optimized for mobile devices. On the screen behind him, Huffman displays an example of Google search that displays desktop Web results and mobile Web results, the latter denoted by a red square.

Mobile search must also be easy. Huffman demos a shared desktop-mobile search for a flight number. Since he’s logged into his Google account, his search for “ba 284? SF-London on the desktop is immediately shared with the Google app on his mobile device. An unreleased feature, but it’s on its way. A quick look at local listings automatically delivered to devices on the basis on GPS/cell tower location, and then Huffman brings Mayer on stage.

Mayer talks a bit about universal search before moving on to Google’s “bento box” of search results. She talks about Google’s focus on the importance of presentation and its efforts to make search results more usable for the user. An example of this SearchWiki, a tool that allows users to annotate their searches, to “keep their train of thought,” says Mayer. We need to help our users find more and do more with it, she says, noting that the company is still working to address some longstanding user problems:

• Finding recent information
• Expressing that you want just one type of result
• Assessing which results are best
• Knowing what you’re looking for
• Expressing your searches in keywords

Mayer introduces Google Search Options, a feature that appends a search option panel to results, allowing users to “slice and dice” the results as they choose. A demo of the feature, in a search for “Hubble Telescope,” allows for search calibration by time, pages that include images, etc. Another search for “solar oven” is filtered down to specific genres–videos, discussion forums, reviews. Click on those links and that new search context is immediately displayed on the page.

Interestingly, the reviews feature uses something called “sentiment analysis” to extract sentiments from a review and present them in displayed snippets.

Search Options also includes a timeline feature that allows users to visualize results over time. And there’s something called “Wonder Wheel,” which presents a visual representation of a query surrounded by potential refinements (hence “Wonder Wheel”). Click on a refinement and results update automatically. Search Options should be going live now, says Mayer.

A bit of geometry monomania here today at Google Searchology. First the Wonder Wheel and now “Google Squared,” a sort of spreadsheet visualization of search being cooked up in Google Labs. Unstructured data pulled directly from search and organized according to the whim of the user. A search for “small dogs” pulls up a lists of–wonder of wonders–small dogs organized by size, weight, breed, etc. Click on an individual cell and you can change its source. Pretty slick. Still a work in progress, though. It should be available later this month, Mayer says during the Q&A.

Another new feature: Rich Snippets. A search for “drooling dog BBQ” returns your standard Google results along with a list of metadata–average user reviews, for example. A search for a GPS system includes an additional pointer to a recent CNET review of the unit in question. Rich Snippets is open API, incidentally.

Last up, an Android star map app that uses GPS to create a star map “local to your place on earth” and to your position. Move the phone and the map adjusts to your view–essentially the app transforms the device into map overlay for the sky. And how does this tie into search? Search for “Gemini” and a sort of pointer appears onscreen directing you to its location in the sky. And with that, Mayer wraps things up.

Looks like “roughly twice what Google (GOOG) offered” was a good enough price to score Microsoft the highly coveted Verizon Wireless search deal. At an investor conference today, Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon Communications (VZ), said the company has struck a five-year deal with Microsoft (MSFT) to make its Live Search the default search engine on Verizon mobile phones. Seidenberg offered no other details beyond that, explaining that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is to officially announce the deal during his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show later today. Of course, now that it’s been unofficially announced, there’s yet another reason to snooze through the Ballmer keynote.

Anyway, this is quite a coup for Redmond. Said Roger Entner, Nielsen’s head of telecom research, “Microsoft really needed to win that. It gives them a good fighting chance. Otherwise they would have been almost insurmountably behind Google [in mobile search].”

It’s always easier to buy your way into a profitable market, than earn it.”

So it is that, Microsoft (MSFT)–which has been paying people to use its Live Search engine to find and purchase products online–is now working to buy its way into the mobile search market by outbidding Google on the search giant’s deal with Verizon. Google (GOOG), as you may recall, has been in talks with Verizon (VZ) for months now about a mobile search pact that would make it the default search on Verizon devices and might someday put the ubiquitous Google search bar on the home screen of its phones. In return, Verizon would share in the revenue generated by the targeted ads Google serves up in its search results.

With mobile search clearly an area of rapid growth for the future, this deal is a strategically important and valuable one for Google, which has said publicly that mobile revenue streams will soon outpace desktop revenues. Which means it’s even more strategically important for Microsoft, one of search’s perennial also-rans. Little wonder then that the company has opened its own discussions with Verizon and is offering the carrier a more generous revenue-sharing plan than the one proposed by Google and a higher guarantee, to boot.

After all, it’s not like we haven’t seen this move before. Back in 1996, Microsoft snatched away Netscape’s browser deal with AOL in exactly the same way.

Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt

The prospect of a mobile revenue stream larger than the $16.6 billion in desktop revenues Google reported in 2007 has inspired the company to put its 700 MHz spectrum spat with Verizon behind it. And now the two companies are becoming fast frienemies … or is it enemiends?

Word on the street has it that Google and Verizon are close to inking a mobile search pact that would make Google (GOOG) the default search on Verizon devices and might someday put the ubiquitous Google search bar on the home screen of its phones. In return, Verizon (VZ) would share in the revenue generated by the targeted ads Google serves up in its search results.

That’s a compelling proposition because that revenue is likely to be substantial. According to comScore M:Metrics, just 16.7 million of the 240 million or so cellphone users in the U.S. use mobile search. The remaining 223 million apparently find the laughable and labyrinthine carrier-developed search solutions available to them too annoying to bother with. Put a Google search box on their phones’ home screens, though, and it would likely be a different story.