Just when you might have been asking yourself who could hurt Google, Yahoo has just announced its acquisition of Aviate. Aviate is a company that provides contextual app search and organisation for mobile phone users. Contextual search is fast becoming the ‘big thing’ with the major tech brands with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Apple and Facebook all having contextual or search efforts in progress. So how exactly does contextual searching work?

Basically, this way of conducting a search differs from the regular search we are all familiar with on Google by trying to anticipate what you really mean or want based on cues in your past searches or in other stores of data the search tool has access to. It’s not simply about matching keywords and ranking incoming links. Aviate will organise the apps on your phone’s home screen according to its best guess at what you need to see right now. It can suggest music apps in your car, fitness apps in the gym, bringing you what you need when you need it. If, for example, you have a history of looking up stocks on your phone, Aviate can make it possible for you to wake up to a homescreen of stock quotes instead of having to scroll for an app.

Yahoo is currently working at addressing the current issue of multiple apps whereby most of us end up downloading loads of them but use only a few, as well as having to scroll through several screens of unused or irrelevant apps to get the one that you need. The future of contextual search does however, seem assured.

Such a search product is likely to sit in front of Google’s Play Store or Apple’s App Store by trying to locate stuff for you before you reach for those other search functions. What the competition will offer regarding similar search solutions remains to be seen but we’re in no doubt that Aviate will take off!