A New Twist on Mobile Search

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What's more, Myers argues, part of what AQA customers are paying for is human intelligence. "The real breakthrough was to get actual people to answer the questions," he says. "Automated answers wouldn't have satisfied anyone; the human touch is where we add value."

Profits in Piecework

For that reason, AQA's business setup is quite unusual. The company employs about 1,000 freelance researchers in Britain and abroad—many of them students—who are paid about 60¢ for every correct answer they provide. (The balance of the $2 fee is divided between AQA and mobile operators.) The piecework approach keeps overhead to a minimum. "They only have to pay researchers when texts come in," says Analysys researcher Grant.

No doubt some of AQA's traffic could be vulnerable as the novelty wears off. About 40% of incoming inquiries run from unanswerable ("Who is going to win tomorrow's football match?") to absurd. But the remaining 60% are serious requests for information—everything from facts and figures to the location of the nearest Chinese restaurant. Myers says he expects the percentage of nontrivial inquiries to grow as customers start to see AQA as a kind of mobile Yellow Pages.

To speed responses, reduce costs, and improve the quality and consistency of responses, AQA also has built up a database of 10 million previously answered questions to which researchers can refer. Myers says that 35% of incoming questions now can be answered immediately from the database, and he expects the figure to rise above 40% in the next few years.

One question in the database that gets asked surprisingly often is "What is the meaning of life?" AQA has an answer for that: "Life is the result of a complex sequence of chain reactions and has no underlying meaning: Find out what you love and do it." For other such inquiries where there is no definite answer, AQA researchers are urged to be creative. "We're not afraid to give you our opinion," Myers says. "Opinions are more useful than not answering the question."

Plans for Expansion

To branch out from its core business, AQA now is in talks with firms to offer bespoke text-answering services for customers. An airline, for example, could hire the British firm to field questions related to flight delays or connections, which would usually be answered through call centers.

AQA also has plans to expand into Germany and Italy, where services will start under licensing agreements with local companies in the third quarter of 2008. This will be combined with a $4 million advertising campaign across the company's markets, which dwarfs the $500,000 AQA spent on marketing last year.

Still, AQA and rival Texperts face the risk that mobile search eventually will go the way of its fixed-line counterpart—to Google and others. "These products are really hot, but it's still early in their commercial application,"” says Stephanie Pittet, an analyst for research firm Gartner (IT) in Paris, who adds that lots of firms are trying to find the killer application to bring mobile search to the masses.

Text-based responses backed by human researchers are likely to be just one of the solutions. But as long as someone in the world is dying to know what a baby herring is called, there still will be a place for mobile services like AQA.

Scott is a reporter in BusinessWeek's London bureau .