Google Says More Searches Now on Mobile Than on Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Google Says More Searches Now on Mobile Than on Desktop

searchengineland.com

92 pointsindus43 comments

That is not surprising at all. Most of people who use the Internet on mobile don't even now what a browser is, much less a domain name. They search every site they want to visit, even if they just needed to add .com to their search term to open the site straight away in the browser. The "Internet" is the google search box.

It could also be because the interface on mobile is significantly worse than on a desktop. Just doing a search, by typing into the already active text box, is easier than trying to navigate to the URL bar, hitting the wrong keys and getting the URL wrong. It's easier to just do a search and let Google work it out.

Honestly I'm surprised how many how almost exclusively use their phone to go online. It's seems like a huge step backwards in usability.

My wife is one of those people and one day I asked her why she goes for her phone instead of her tablet when she wants to look something up. It's because she is already on her phone most of the time, because after work she spends hours messaging with her friends. (I can't even sit near her when she's doing this because she doesn't turn off the buzzer and it's super annoying to be around.) She spends many, many hours looking at that little screen.

Personally, the less I have to interact with my limited phone, the better. I use it mainly for 4 things: calls, sms, maps and music. Once in a while, I use it to read the news when I'm not near an actual computer (or tablet). Occasionally, I use specialized apps like Amazon AWS Virtual MFA. Other than that, I just can't stand to use it for anything.

How does this affect advertisements and click rates? Often times I am presented with two results which are correct - one promoted (ad) and one search result. If I click the promoted one I am contributing to the advertisement's click through metrics. If more people are using google as their navigation aid, is the ad value still as important? Could facebook or other top services be paying $$$ in advertisement fees simply because people don't want to add ".com" to their query?

Navigational search queries (e.g. brand or site names) should usually be added as negative keywords in Adwords campaigns. This prevents your ads from being served for those keywords. To answer your question, ads are still very valuable for some types of searches - primarily those that are non-navigational in nature e.g. "personal injury lawyer + [city name]".

Depends if its a brand or non brand search - plus there is the issue of brand spillage.

I have written a tool to help our PC team manage our clients accounts so they don't waste the PPC budget

I wonder how many googles they get for google.

I guess a lot of them. I've seen it live, and I don't get out much.

A lot, probably. If you look at google.com/trends there are two countries that have a 'most searched' graph, Belgium and The Netherlands. Google has a fourth place in Belgium and a third place in The Netherlands.

God is this true. My girlfriend just types 'facebook' into the URL bar, then clicks on Facebook.com. I don't understand it.

So she navigates to facebook in 9 taps (facebook + select), while you get there in 16 (www.facebook.com)? Sounds to me like she's the one in the know.

No, he (like most of us) types `f` and the browser autocompletes.

Also my keyboard has a .com button, and I don't have to wait for two webpages to load, just one ;)

There is occasionally a valid reason to do this.

Lets say you are not sure of the url. Maybe you are looking to sign up for an account at actualwebsite.com but the real url is actualwebsiteinc.com, you're really better off searching for "actualwebsite" and clicking the 1st link google gives you.

Don't dump your girlfriend, she might be ok in the long run.

http://jokes.christiansunite.com/Men_vs._Women/At_the_ATM_Ma...

Indeed, I think the simplicity of a single search box is so alluring compared to typing out a URL - to many, it's basically their idea vision of a computer as "the device that can answer your questions".

It's somewhat unfortunate, because the Internet is so much more than only what can be found via Google.

Without google the internet would basically be just following links and word of mouth. Far more of the internet is accessible due to search engines.

Lots of folks talking about people retrying searches, or doing unneeded searches instead of typing the URL, etc. However, this already happens a lot on desktop computers (especially the later). It may be true that these things happens more often on mobile than on desktop, but this is hardly why mobile is superseding desktop.

First, I run a lot of searches on my phone because it is more practical. "Where is restaurant X?" "What time will Y event start?". Even at home, I won't go to the laptop to make this search, specially if I'm discussing something with my wife.

In the same manner, add to this to a lot of vanity searches, like when I'm discussing something with someone and I get my phone to find out some fact. "How old is the president?" "How much does an airplane weight?". I surely do a lot more of these researches on mobile, most of them I wouldn't do in a desktop, just because It wouldn't make any sense to stop conversation to search a desktop, while the phone is there, waiting for me.

Second, and probably more important, is that lots of people now have their mobile phone, or tablet, as their primary computer. My wife don't open her laptop except for writing long documents or academic work.

Like with cameras, the best computer is the one which is with you right now, and laziness to get up often beats the efficiency of my laptop even when I'm at home. Most people is using IM all the time, and the phone is with them while they're at it, and don't even consider looking for a desktop.

So, I think these two factors are adding up pretty quickly: people are using more mobile than desktop and people with mobiles tend to use search much more. If this is happening faster from expected, or not, as the article implies, it's mere statistics.

> doing unneeded searches instead of typing the URL, etc.

Did anyone else notice on non-mobile that chrome and later firefox address bar history was longer earlier. The history is slowly made shorter to push people typing and searching. I'm curious how much revenue that added to search engines. Truncation of local bookmarks and browser history would give a good fraction per person per browser boost to remote search engines as your incomplete word fragments are sent to them for intermediating your search result.

Announcement: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-for-next-moment...

So was the tipping point somewhere around Feb 26, 2015 when they announced their algorithm update? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-m...

Quick way to check: Is your site mobile friendly? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

That's probably me repeatedly trying Google's speech recognition search before giving up and going to type in the search phrase :)

Is this a recent experience? I've found the voice search to be incredibly proficient recently. It's slightly embarrassing, but I use it for search and text dictation almost constantly.

I'm running a "bi lingual" phone. OS language is set to English (because I like my computing to be in English) and because of locality I also added German to the voice recognition.

Sometimes Google thinks I'm speaking German when really I'm speaking English and vice versa (especially searching for English named products with a German phrase).

It can get really annoying sometimes. But I guess it's mostly my fault for falling out of the default modus operandi. :)

My wife uses speech input almost exclusively. She says that it is the most accurate way to text due to auto correct and simple typing errors that than need to be corrected or send a second corrected text.

She hates most technology and just likes her old and tried ways and it has shocked me how much she picked up voice search and texting.

what phone does she have? I gave up on voice recognition a decade ago because I realized the thing has to work as good as an average person's ear/understanding capacity or it just stinks to use. So I said, I'll give it a decade or more. I still thought it was not there, since I never see people use Siri. Maybe I'm wrong?

I'd say it's close enough to being there, that it's there. I get about 95% accuracy, and the 5% is overcome by how much faster it is than poking fake keys.

This only applies to generic language. Unusual phrasings, niche words, or proper nouns come out wrong. This make speech perfect for quick texting, but still unusable for real writing.

Try using voice on any Android phone. Look for a little microphone icon wherever the virtual keyboard is up, and try a few things out for yourself, such as dictating an SMS message. It's come a long way in the last 4 years. It's come a very, very long way in the last 10 years.

Samsung Note 3. Also Siri is not as good as the Android voice.

Didn't know that. Thanks. I'll check out this model, or a newer one. Still using a flip phone but it's about time, since pretty much everyone now talks through whatsapp in my country.

It has become my main source of search entry to be honest.

I'm curious if search companies ever publish information on whether their products are actually useful.

For e.g. One measure of success for something like a search engine could be a reduction in the number of different search queries leading to the same user-click. People needing to rephrase and re-search is bad for the users, but paradoxically good for Google. And so, the search product would be vastly improved if Google targeting having the least "engagement" and a higher result convergence. But then again, that applies to many advertising-funded web properties.

Maybe someone should tell the idiots that design most of the horrible mobile sites to stop forwarding link clicks from search results to the main page. Mobile sites are garbage 90% of the time anyway...

Google claims that they now penalize these sites on mobile: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/changes-i...

As of mid 2013 according to that blog, but I still bump into this from time to time

It's been clear for a while that overall traffic from mobile is going to eclipse traditional PC's.

I'm interested in seeing stats on whether or not traffic from native apps is increasing over mobile websites. I'm sure traffic from google's "Search" app is minuscule compared to browser requests, but could a similar app come along and start to chip away at Google with the right native experience?

I used to work in Search at another company. You'd be surprised how often people would type "Google" in the search box (or "Facebook" or, in some cases, the name of the company itself, on whose search page they were on!)

Mobile is much harder to monetize than web; so it'll be interesting to see what this does to Google's numbers. Sponsored Search is, after all, their main bread and butter.

I'm surprised the global tipping point is now and not about two years ago.

I suppose this includes the many ways I can search for things on my Android phone that always goes through Google? As opposed to the fewer ways I can search on my desktop that doesn't always go through Google?

I changed my desktop search engine to Bing.

I use a proxy, I'm the only user of that particular IP, and I get constant nagging about too many searches from my network in google search. Good riddance.

I changed my desktop search engine to Bing because of the rewards I get. It's a great incentive to use Bing. (j/k)

It may seem obvious, but check the proxy's logs. Perhaps you're not the only one connecting.

Just in case, I did the check.

Nope, the proxy only accepts connections from localhost, and no one has my ssh private key.

But there are some failed connection attempts from one particular IP from China.

Your proxy IP block has probably been flagged as a source of badness.

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