
Google Says More Searches Now on Mobile Than on Desktop - indus
http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369
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psykovsky
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.

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

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sliverstorm
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.

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

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aylons
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.

~~~
diminish
> 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.

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GameTheory8
Announcement: [http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-for-next-
moment...](http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-for-next-moment.html)

So was the tipping point somewhere around Feb 26, 2015 when they announced
their algorithm update?
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-m...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-
more-mobile-friendly-search.html)

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

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

~~~
psbp
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.

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baldfat
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.

~~~
sanoli
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?

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

~~~
sanoli
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.

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ksk
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.

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profinger
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...

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_delirium
Google claims that they now penalize these sites on mobile:
[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/changes-i...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/changes-
in-rankings-of-smartphone_11.html)

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

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tammer
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?

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discardorama
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.

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

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talmand
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?

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Shorel
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.

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

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Shorel
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.

