Hard times for mobile searchers

 – posted September 5th, 2008 by Belen Barros     Comments (4)

I met one of the other Dublin visitors to MobileHCI today. She is Karen Church from UCD, who came to Amsterdam to present a paper on mobile search behaviour in Europe.

These are some of the things she and her colleagues found out:

  • Mobile search queries contain approximately 2.2 terms and 13.4 characters on average. Searches using Google seem to be slightly longer (2.3 terms or 14.5 characters).

  • Often people use the operator search engine to find Google, typing ‘Google’ as the search query instead of typing the Google URL in their mobile browser.

  • More than 50% of the users submitted just a single unique query per day. So the small percentage of the total mobile phone users who do use mobile search use it very little!

  • In a single search session, users issued an average of 8.6 queries. Several queries in the same session normally correspond to people trying to find something by modifying the original query. 8.6 attempts to find the same thing it’s quite a lot: it looks as if it’s difficult to find what you are looking for on the mobile web.

  • People often search for similar content using very similar vocabulary.

  • Users search mainly for…. adult-related content! (61% of the top 500 queries). Other popular subjects are ‘email, messaging and chat’, ’search and finding things’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘multimedia’.

  • In almost 90% of the Google searches users decided not to click on any of the results. This is a measure of the quality of the results (if they were good and relevant, users would click on them). Therefore, huge room for improvement here.

  • When users did click on the results, 60% of them selected one of the top 3 positions.

The paper concludes that

Mobile search engines have largely adopted a conventional Web-based approach to search, but this is failing to deliver a high-quality user experience.

These are hard times for mobile searchers!

I really wanted to talk to Karen about her findings, but she had to run to the airport to catch her flight.

However, she has offered to meet me back in Dublin to share her insights on how we search on mobiles, and what the search engines should be doing to improve the mobile internet experience.

I look forward to that conversation.

Categories Enterprise Search, Life outside iQ, Search Engine Optimisation, Usability

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