Siri, Search and Australia

The Apple iPhone 4S has a thing called Siri. Siri has changed search. Google and Windows phones have something similar, but they’re not as good. (Vested interests). With Siri, we’re one step closer to having a functioning oracle. Ask a question of your phone and receive an answer – an intelligent one.

Ask a Fact:

 “How far is it from Melbourne to Sydney?”

Or something more subjective:

“Where’s the best vindaloo on Victoria St?”

“The best plumber in Richmond?” or

“The best Spanish School in Melbourne?”

Of course this functionality isn’t completely here (Australia) yet but it’s not far away.

This style of search works on delivering answers from a range of different databases. For questions related to restaurants, entertainment and local businesses U.S Siri searches sites like Yelp and for facts, Wolfram Alpha. For everything in between there’s speculation that sites like Quora will fill the gaps.

The Australian equivalents are sites like truelocal and eatability amongst a myriad of others but we’re missing a Quora.

What’s Quora?

From their website: “Quora is a continuously improving collection of questions and answers” or put another way a ‘Wikipedia’ of useful and thought out Q & A.

Without an Australian styled Quora or people devoting time to completing an Australian based section ON Quora (it’s started) we’ll never get answers to critical questions like:

“What did Bob Hawke say when we won the America’s cup?”

 or answer

“how many cans did David Boon once drink on a flight to the UK?”

So what does this mean for Australian businesses? What are the implications?

Firstly search marketing will change. SEO will need to include a heavy focus on creating listings in review sites and encouraging customers to review to increase rank. Since we don’t know which sites Apple will end up using in their databases yet (do we?) it’d be wise for businesses to hedge their bets across a range of sites.

Secondly we need a Quora. We need an entrepreneur or brand to step up and build an online database of Q & As relating to Australia so that when we ask our phone our questions we’re not returned some offensive, American similarity.  An appropriate brand might be Qantas and an obvious campaign would be to enlist the public to help pose and answer our questions.

Like all things digital, this change is happening quickly. Google already report that 25% of mobile search is conducted by voice so to get a head start on the competition Australian businesses need to start acting now.