What are people searching for, and how are they searching?

As more and more people spend time on the mobile web, the volume of mobile search queries is also rapidly increasing. Mobile Commerce has been providing the search functionality to a number of the mobile operators in the UK, and has recently released a report which provides a detailed look at how people search over mobile.

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According to Mobile Commerce, the volume of mobile searches doubled over the past 12 months. There are two key reasons for this:

• first, the number of mobile subscribers using the mobile internet is growing, and
• second, the number of searches per user per month has jumped from 8 to 13.

What Gets Searched

The majority of this report looks in detail at what people are searching for, and the exact way that they phrase the search query.

This information if very interesting as it can have strong implications for advertisers who want to be able to bid on the best keywords, and for publishers who want to be able to optimize their site.

As an example, look at the list of the top 20 most searched terms for 2009. The list includes 4 different ways that people searched for Facebook, and two for Google and two for YouTube.

In fact, the study states that there are in fact about 700 different ways that people searched for Facebook during the year!

As part of their analysis, Mobile Commerce developed a taxonomy which enabled them to group searches into categories so they could understand better what kinds of searches were being made. The overall breakdown is shown below.

The report also found that an amazing 42% of all searches are what they term “single user searches”, in other words, a search phrase that was only entered by a single person!

Local Search, Click Destinations, and more

There is a lot more information in this study, including

• findings about what sort of results subscribers like to click on
  (for certain categories mobile web is strongly preferred),
• local search
• how people construct their search queries

To get the download link for this study, please enter
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and company name here:

16.05.2010    Tags: Market-Resources, mobile-internet, Mobile-Search