This article is so full of errors and inaccurate guesses, it is not even funny. In reality, mobile users search at least as often as desktop users.<p>Error #1: despite Google explicitly stating half the searches are mobile and "this excludes tablets" [1], the author accidentally included Android tablet users in his calculations (he used the "1.4 billion" Android users figure). At least 200 million of these 1.4 billion are Android tablets, so the number of Android phones is 1.2 billion. This sets the mobile searches per device per day at 1.04.<p>Error #2: the author's gross rounding of the number of PCs in use is incorrect. It was already estimated at 1.5 billion in 2013, and said to grow to about 2.3 billion by 2015 [2]. Just plugging this number into the author's math, and this sets the desktop searches per device per day at 0.87.<p>So fixing these two errors alone and you end up with the conclusion that mobile users search a lot more than desktop users (1.04 vs. 0.87).<p>[1] <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-searches-surpass-those-on-pcs/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-se...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-base-worldwide" rel="nofollow">https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-ba...</a> (That's the most current estimate I could find —honestly 2.3 billion is likely an overestimate because they didn't forecast the tablet growth, but if it is anywhere above 1.85 billion my point and math stands).
This might be far out, but could it also hint that we are very unproductive while using social media and apps, and in general not creating any value (which to my knowledge are some of the biggest time-consumers when on mobile)?<p>I mean, when I'm on social media, I'm rarely cross-checking information, let alone doing something useful with the information I find. So I don't need to search. It's basically pure consumption.<p>Perhaps that's just the general thing about mobile - that people aren't productive while not near their computers. Personally, I never use my smartphone for anything then note-taking, and even that is a tedious task. That being said, I actually Google more often since I got an Android phone, due to the fact that the Google-search bar is on my front-page, and so I don't need to open my browser manually.
There is also another factor that may influence this statistic: most android phones in the general population are slow as hell. While in IT, especially in mobile development, phones are fast-ish. Developers keep adding features (OS as well as app) when they should be doing performance optimization.<p>I have a 1 year old, low/mid range phone I bought because I just didn't have the cash for a flagship. I have only the "most common" apps installed. Mobile web is unusable. Opening chrome takes 2 minutes, doing the actual search a minute more, rendering the site ... well, let's just say I have JS turned off. Unless I don't have access to the internet some other way and it's really crucial, I'm just not going to bother.
Using a phone for search is like sucking in information through a straw. Even if you do find something, nobody really wants to setup copy-paste infrastructure between their phone and desktop/laptop. Yes, I know about AirDroid. Loading almost any page is going to be painfully slow, render poorly, and then break completely. When I have loaded a page, I use ctrl+f to search for whatever I was looking for, and I use a large screen to render all the content so my eyes can lock on to whatever I am looking for. Going through 10 different results is just painful on a phone, and on a laptop I can do it in less than a minute. Small screen and touch doesn't benefit me enough to switch from desktop search to phone search...
I'm aware that my own experience clouds my perception but it's still surprising to me. One of the main uses of a smartphone for me (even since my first Treo) is that I've got a "pocket Google". Messaging and social media and games are all great but for me, having a pocket reference the size of a massive global library remains one of the "killer apps".<p>I used to joke that smart phones are the equivalent of Penny's "computer book" from the Inspector Gadget cartoons I watched as a kid. I remember being in grade school watching that show and thinking how awesome it would be to have a powerful computer I could carry around with me all the time and use to find any info I wanted.
If I have understood this correctly, Google are losing out on people searching for Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other large web properties, which people either can't be bothered to type in full into the address bar, or are clueless to the fact that you can type an address without using Google.<p>In which case, do these lost searches actually reduce revenue in terms of valid as click throughs? I would argue that most people searching for Facebook for example are simply going to click on the first Facebook link the results.<p>If Facebook really are going to advertise (paid) in Google for the search term Facebook, then obviously Google miss out on a relatively pointless ad, but in most cases, I can't see the loss here. Why would Facebook advertise for the term "Facebook"?
I suspect this is a naive guestimate by the author. There are many ways to search that don't involve going to google.com in a browser, and with the combination of Google Now and Google Maps/Nav, people surface a lot of queries through organic behavior. It can't be overstated, too, that Google is making the majority of the money from in-app advertising, so that additionally mitigates the decline.<p>If I were an investor, I might be worried about some aspects of Google, but this isn't one of them.<p>I'm probably biased, though. I am constantly "ok googling" to learn stuff. Having young children will do that to you.
Is 'searches per day' an important metric? It seems obvious that someone on a desktop PC doing a navigational search for 'facebook' and immediately clicking on the first link only costs Google money. Google get zero benefit from it. Eliminating those searches would be a good thing (so long as people still use Google for searches that Google can wring some cash out of).<p>Fewer navigational searches would increase the proportion of monetisable searches; wouldn't that be a good thing for Google?
What I got from this article is that Google is making money every time I open a web browser on a desktop, type in "facebook", and click on the top search result. Now on mobile devices, there's an actual app for Facebook, and opening the app is cutting Google out of the loop (and the Money). Is that right?!<p>If that's the case, then it seems pretty shitty from the advertiser's point of view. Especially since Google came up with the all-in-one search and url bar "feature" in Chrome.
I'm confused... How can the mode number of searches be 0.5?!<p>"More people perform half a search every day, than any other amount." -- What?!<p>I guess maybe that's more like "the mode over 30 days, divided by 30"?
That's no surprise.<p>Phones are a consumption device when it comes to internet stuff, not a creation device and to do a search you have to enter text, which is (at least it is for me) more trouble than it seems worth. I can wait with most stuff I could do while on the move until I'm home, and I can use my phone to make calls. I don't remember when was the last time that I used the browser on my phone for anything at all. On those few occasions where I absolutely had to search for something while on the move it's a small inconvenience to have to boot the laptop.<p>If text entry were easier on phones I'm sure this percentage would go up but since keyboards have been declared 'out' by the design departments this is unlikely to change much.<p>Witness the signature lines 'apologizing for the brevity of this response but I'm on my phone' and more evidence like that that people do not like to enter text on a phone any more than they absolutely have to.
I'm probably an outlier but I don't bother with that many apps on my iPhone. <i>I just Google everything.</i><p>Look up a movie? 'imdb spiderman'<p>Want to know how many calories is in something? 'cinnabon calories'<p>What's the football score? 'piggers score'
Google monetizes more searches & apps than just web searches. How many mobile users do 0 web searches per day AND don't check their gmail AND don't use google maps AND don't use any android apps that display google ads, etc.
Why is it a problem for Google if people aren't searching on phones? I'm not searching from my smart tv either. Smart tvs are in millions of homes and nobody is searching from them. Is that a problem?
Uh?<p>1. 50% of people do one or more searches on mobile. That's awesome from Google's POV!<p>2. The number of people who are using mobile for their Internet has exploded in only a few years, many of those people still use their desktop for search.<p>3. Many, many people still don't use their phone for anything other than texting and phone calls.<p>But here is the kicker:<p>4. Charles Arthur is extrapolating a measure of central tendency in a rather foolish way. He's taking the mean average of the number of searches from mobiles per day <i>for an entire month</i>, then he's extrapolating that none of those mobile users do any searches per day <i>for an entire month</i>.<p>In other words, he's saying that half of all users don't do ANY searches at all, whereas all that he can say is that on some days, some users don't do any Google searches on their mobile device.<p>And if that's all his statistics are showing, then I'm not exactly blown away with this insight.
I think the real issue here is that a significant number of Android users in particular aren't really "smartphone" users, they are phone customers who get a smartphone for free.<p>There are a significant number of users who <i>need</i> feature phones, get the Mega Droid Ultra XVII for $0 and use it as a phone exclusively. When these users "graduate" to do more stuff, they light up features. Your mom figured out how to text, grandpa discovered Facebook, etc. It's not a computer to them.<p>Then you have weirdos like me who are immersed in the phone all of the time. I frequently (as in dozens of times a day) do research and other web searchy things on my iPhone, and either consume stuff I find on the phone or handoff to my Macbook. I know a couple of people who take it even further with apple watch and alerting.
I could be wrong about this but my theory is that search engines are not very conversation oriented particularly google's. That is a majority of people want to have a "conversation" and that for the mast amount of non-techie people they would rather ask questions to a human-like entity instead of searching. It also may not be technical reasons but language reasons as well. On various social apps people can get trusted answers from their friends and family in their language.<p>I have also noticed on StackOverflow/Quora there are an enormous amount of questions that could have been answered by a simple google query. A vast amount of these people through anecdotal observation are novice computer users and English is not their first language.
Oh cry me a river! Computer industry wanted to create docile "consumers" who don't do anything useful, so they could sell actually useful devices (for example mobile with keyboards or netbooks with 3:4 aspect ratio) to "professionals" for 10x the price, or "enterprise" for 100x the price. And now you complain about the fact that most of the consumers actually are docile?<p>I really wish the idea of tiered pricing would die, at least to significant extent. Can you imagine living in a world where everybody has access to potentially the best, professional equipment for affordable prices? How much more productive such society could be? I think access to the best technology should be an universal human right!
I do many searches a day, but I use the built in search in iOS... pull down from the home screen and get a search box. Hits apps, emails, everything in an integrated search. The backend of this is "SIRI" (I believe it's the same platform that siri voice search uses) and ultimately it may result in google searches. For now.<p>My career has spent a fair bit of time working on search engines... google's moat is that everyone uses it, it has the audience. Providing competent search is something a company the size of Apple could replicate with some effort.<p>I thin the threat to google is real... I think google knew this a decade ago, and that's why they bought Android Inc. and developed the android OS.
If I'm at work, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop.<p>If I'm at home I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop.<p>If I'm travelling, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on Firefox Mobile on my Android phone (HTC One).
Depends how you define search.<p>In days of yore, people searched for the website they wanted - e.g. they searched for Trello or Reddit in Google. Now they search the App Store, and install the App they want.<p>Similarly, if they want to search Reddit, they just search on the Reddit app where before there was a good chance they would search Reddit via Google because they typed their query into the URL bar.<p>That said, Google have a lot of apps. I search for directions in Google Maps, I search my emails in GMail, and for photos in Google Photos. They are all searches, they are just not the kind of searches we made 10 years ago.
The author needs to clarify what portion of total revenue Google derives from ads, and then to break those ads out by service (Youtube, Gmail, Sponsored search), platform (desktop vs. mobile), and geography. Those stats probably aren't publicly available, but it would be good to have a rough estimate so we could have a more nuanced conversation around relative values rather than just one big pot of "ad revenue".<p>Otherwise, you're really just fumbling around in the dark, saying that monetizing mobile searches with such a low average daily click rate are a big problem for Google when the reality could be that they've never made much money from mobile search ads, especially in developing countries where they are adding the most users whose ad clicks are worth less because they have less disposable income than the average American or European. Similarly I'd wager that mobile search ads are a very small portion of Google's overall mobile business, and that Google never planned to make much money from mobile search in the first place, understanding that building out the app ecosystem and getting Android onto a ton of phones was more important in the long run.<p>People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume.<p>This as a cool thought experiment that could have been improved with more insight into breaking "ad revenue" into meaningful chunks to see whether or not Google actually cares about the slice considered in the headline: mobile search ad revenue.
There's a major problem with his calculation: the number of queries per month.<p>The latest available number is from 2012:
<a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-year-212940" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-y...</a><p>That's 3 years ago.
Are his quoted 1.4bn Android devices all outside of China? If not then the numbers for mobile and desktop come out pretty similar:<p><pre><code> 1.3bn non-China Android users = 1.4bn Android users - 0.386bn China Android users [1]
1.28 searches/user/day = 50bn searches / (1.3bn users * 30 days)
</code></pre>
That 1.28 for mobile is pretty close to the 1.23 quoted for desktop<p>[1] <a href="https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-users-q2-2014/" rel="nofollow">https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-...</a>
Just three data points, but my wife, my best friend, and I all do many voice searches each day. My wife and I have Android Note 4s so we are using Google Now, which is Google search with more context, and my friend uses Siri on his iPhone, which is mostly Wolfram Alpha (right?).<p>Getting directions, searching for a recipe, fact checking during a discusion, asking about the weather, etc. is all so easy using voice search. Slipping a few advertisements into voice query results seems doable and may be a reason why Google Now does not return more results via speech synthesis.
Hardly surprising. On Google desktop most queries are navigational these days, something that's unnecessary when using mobile apps (spotlight search). And doing research on mobiles is a chore.
Those who type "Facebook" in the address bar with the intent of visiting Facebook, do they ever actually generate clicks on ads? Read past the first result? Is anyone even advertising on google for that search term?<p>Google has to make sure that people type "shoes" into their search engine (Protip: don't) on a regular basis. I'm sure Google isn't too worried about losing non-profitable "app-launch" searches which really all should have had the I'm-feeling-lucky behavior bypassing ads anyway.
Yeah, searching on a mobile keyboard is a pain. Hence the huge push to intelligent agents (Siri, Now, Cortana).<p>We're currently in the unfortunate position to be using mobile devices heavily but not yet having decent intelligent agents.<p>If you believe @swardley (which in my entirely unqualified way I'm inclined to) this will be a huge battlefield over the next 20 years or so:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512</a>
Well, i think Google is definitely trying to overcome the problem with the decrease in search whilst increase in use of social apps for information.And it has released 'Google Now on Tap as the answer!<p>It's been a week i started using the new feature and i made hundreds of searches indirectly through Now on Tap. This is an outstanding feature for sure and i strongly feel would bring back Google as the winner for search even in the mobile world.<p>Having said that, i am not sure how Google would deal with iOS devices.
I'd like this cross-referenced with the prevalence of ad-words being pushed on me like I'm a 13-year old buying weed for the first time. As it stands now I search on google less and less. I'm not sure what happened, either I search for less ambiguous questions or I simply know all I search about. But when I do search it seems my first 5 links are not good, unless I searched with something with an obvious answer.
I think part of the problem is mobile UI. If someone doesn't have the Google search bar widget or the search app on their phone(android) then they have to pull up the Chrome/FF to search. Pulling up a browser app will reload the last page you were on last time. So then you need to either wait for the tab to load before entering your search term OR you open a new tab to search. This is all very clunky and inconvenient.
I use the OK Google voice search and do "XYZ near me" all the time. I guess many people have not caught on to these "near me" searches
Other than the Nexus 9, Google hasn't done much to revitalize the use of tablets. This will hurt search numbers that are connected to people using office productivity tools, and it will put a drag on Google supposed new urgency to compete with Microsoft Office. A choice of tablets from multiple OEMs that are directly comparable with iPad Pro would do a lot for these causes.
The entire mobile browsing experience on Android is broken. It's slow, it's full of distracting modal ads and videos that frequently lead to #$%^ing slide shows, and to top it off, Chrome frequently crashes. And no, I don't want to install web site X's app for a better browsing experience, gag me.<p>In that context, I don't find this result particularly surprising.
Unless I'm on wifi doing searches on my phone seems to take too long to be worth it.I'm impatient so I don't feel like spending 10-15 seconds per page load. When I'm on wifi I'm also close enough to a desktop that has a full keyboard so there is no longer a purpose for me to search on my phone.<p>I probably do less than 10 mobile google searches per year.
For me (and as many have mentioned):<p>- Browsing on the phone is kinda slow. Mostly unworkable unless you have a fairly new phone.<p>- Even if you do have a newish phone with decent horsepower, most pages are unreadable due to all of the ads. Stuff crashes or just freaks out and I give up or go to my desktop/laptop. AdBlockers make a <i>huge</i> difference.
Interesting question is "zero searches" or "zero searches through Google" ? We've seen a number of apps (TravelAdvisor, Yelp, AngiesList, OpenTable) which seem to have captured search traffic for their particular specialty. I could easily see Google not getting any of that traffic.
This is why I know of people using phablets for the very reason of getting more done because of a bigger screen. The reverse of phablets to get work done is using several 4K screens or 'Bloomberg terminals' to do your computing. A rare sight and experience to behold
Searching on mobile is tedious in compared to using a keyboard. I'd be more inclined to use the voice search if it wasn't socially awkward.<p>Google has other avenues to work. This problem is more so a service designed for desktop web experience isn't as easily usable on mobile.
It is probably worth noting that Google still owns a huge chunk of the advertising ecosystem on mobile, so if people are living inside of apps, they still make good money as people discover information and use computers.<p>I think it's a different model and user behavior.
People use mobile phones in addition to desktops. They might be doing a price check on a mobile phone and then actually purchasing on their desktop.<p>They might be reading the news, which is roughly 50%-99% PR placements depending on the publication, which pushes them down some sales funnel or another. They're just browsing higher up in the conversion funnel. Searches higher up in the funnel tend to be less valuable in terms of costs per click than searches which are closer to the purchase.<p>Everything in the news is marketing anyway, and it's just as paid for as it is when it's an ad -- often times it's more expensive, because access to the news is rationed by publicists and PR firms rather than by the advertising department. Further, the bulk of social media is the effluvia of PR as it reverberates through people who talk too much on the internet. As far as Google is concerned, that propaganda consumption is just likely to stimulate more searches later on which can be advertised against.<p>The flow might be: Check Facebook App -> Click Gossip Rag Article -> See fabulous new shoes in celebrity photo -> Order lunch on Seamless App -> Go home from work -> Remember to Google "buy red high heels kim kardashian" -> Click ad -> Price check, bounce (Google gets paid) -> "red high heels discount" -> Click ad (Google gets paid again) -> Buy shoes.<p>When they are ready to buy, they will pay for the $10 click -- maybe multiple times across different advertisers -- on their desktop or $15 app download on their mobile phone.<p>The headline that this author uses is also really loosey goosey. Google's ad products on mobile are also increasingly more biased towards generating paid phone calls. When you search for a locksmith or auto repair, you want to get a guy on the phone right now, and are likely to need to buy immediately.<p>So, this isn't really Google's "growing problem" -- Google as an organization is set up to use machine learning to figure out how to make money off of mobile search behavior. The company is still learning what it has to do to make money off of mobile search behavior and how it differs from behavior on desktops.<p>Also, as far as Google's customers (advertisers) are concerned, if a desktop search results in people subscribing to an e-mail list that they read on their phone, the advertiser earned measurable results from the money that they gave Google. If their customers don't like to buy on mobile or they behave differently, campaigns can be configured accordingly.
IMHO most new smart phone users haven't figured out what they can do with their phones. It could very well go the other way - search volumes explode as search gets better and users of search get better at searching.
This is funny to me, because aside from a texting device my phone serves primarily as a quick fact checker. I'm constantly searching. Google and the OED app are my favorite smart phone conveniences.
This is particularly ironic. I remember the messages we got from Google earlier this year telling us that our websites could be penalized in their rankings for not being sufficiently mobile-friendly...
My search pattern changed when I got a useful phone. The most useful was my old Droid 4. It had the real keyboard, and I used the crap out of it. The phone itself was no winner, but it could render search results reasonably, which is what made the whole thing worth it.<p>Those changed a little with a Note 4. It's a much more powerful phone, and I do still search on it, but touch input is a modest PITA. I cut back on searches, but I have added some voice use cases too.<p>In my experience, people with powerful phones use them more. A lot of phones out there aren't so powerful, and they keep it to social, MMS, etc...<p>I actually disallow FaceBook on my phone. It's a battery hog, and I've better things to do. FB once a week on a laptop is enough for me.
It's obvious why this is the case imho, typing with your thumbs suck, and I don't want to say "anti-itch cream" out loud into my phone so I'll wait until I get home.
I wonder what's up with those annual 15%-or-so dips. Maybe a religious holiday? I'd love to see an X axis there. And does it continue to this day? (The photo is from 2011.)
How will this impact the time table to reach the googleplex singularity godhead?<p>...<p>Or maybe after all they're just some guys who made a profitable search at exactly the right time, then pigged out on an IPO?
That is indeed a problem given the awful quality of display ad performance within mobile apps. App traffic is the first thing experienced campaign managers shutoff on the GDN.
this article seems very fishy to me. But can someone interpret this graph for me - <a href="https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-2015-10-19-14-10-44.png" rel="nofollow">https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-...</a> ?<p>At first I just plain didn't believe it; but now I don't even known what I don't believe. What is it saying with that connected, continuous red line?
mobile is really for convenience, i.e. I need make a call, need find a location on the go, need do some photo/IM/social-update once a while, as a to-do-list and calendar, read some news on it, maybe traffic and weather, or even read a book to kill time outside, but that's about it. If I need search something else, or read something seriously, I still prefer my PC/laptop. When thinking about this, I indeed rarely search on the mobile.
There are so many "let's assume" numbers that are based on nothing whatsoever. There's essentially no valid data in this article at all.
If they care so much about search volume, why do they make me fill out CAPTCHAs whenever I try to do multiple search queries in a short period of time?
i'm not the type to call a title "misleading", and this is definitely not misleading in the traditional intentional sense...<p>but, lets be clear here. a LOT more than "<i>50% of people</i>" do 0 searches per day. i mean seriously- wtf? "50% of people"?<p>"more than half of all searches incoming to Google each month are from mobile" is the qualifier we are looking for.
My only thought when I read this was that Siri, Cortana and Google Now are getting used more. This means a lot of searches that used to be done on the Google search app are now being made through other means.
It would be super ironic and fascinating if Google's low-cost mobile operating system was what wound up killing their search business. How long until they start inserting ads into their app store?