13 ms·

Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile

270 points by adidash 11y ago

sputr 11y ago
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. 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.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  I just bought a 2015 Moto G (the 8GB/1GB model, to use without a data plan). It works much better than you describe. Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end?
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    You can pick up any of a dozen Android phones for $20 at Wal-Mart [1]. That's the low end. $200 is a big expense for most people. 1: http://www.walmart.com/browse/cell-phones/shop-all-no-contract-phones/1105910_1072335_1056206?sort=price_low http://www.walmart.com/browse/cell-phones/shop-all-no-contra...
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Those are all carrier locked, so the actual cost of the phone might be higher than the retail price. I don't think net10 is spending huge dollars making their phones cheap, but I'm sure they spend a bit.
      - fein 11y ago
        Yes but unfortunately people look at up front costs and not end costs. $200 to someone living in poverty is more than a month of food, while $20 up front + $40/ month for a baseline limited text and call plan seems far more manageable.
        maxerickson 11y ago
        My point was that the value of the hardware may not be reflected in the retail price of the phone, the purchasing psychology doesn't matter there. It seems that there are lots of ~$100 (or less) phones shipping though, and they are quite a bit less capable than the one I bought.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end? You get reasonable (unlocked!) Android phones for as little as $100, and entry-level ones for a lot less. Low end is really, really low nowadays. Edit: The cheapest I could find: http://www.alcatelonetouch.com/global-en/products/detail?model=POP%20C2 http://www.alcatelonetouch.com/global-en/products/detail?mod... Sells for less than 50€ unlocked.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- skimpycompiler 11y ago
  I have a 4 year old phone. Without all of the kernel optimizations, forced removal of Google App and Google Play Services, I wouldn't be able to do anything. My battery lasts 4 days of normal use. Before my changes it couldn't last 10 hours. So much amateurish bloat. I'm baffled by those engineers.
  - Elessar 11y ago
    Don't be baffled. Engineering is driven by business direction, and the creation of an upgrade cycle is beneficial for the entire Android ecosystem. You are not the customer they want.
    - legulere 11y ago
      This has nothing to do with an upgrade cycle. Optimisation costs engineering time which is quite pricy. So it's an easy way to cut costs.
    - skimpycompiler 11y ago
      > You are not the customer they want. That's true. Then I'd say I just don't like the engineering they are doing.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    How did you force remove the Google apps and Google Play Services? Did this require root? I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition that I bought in February, and it lasts nowhere as long as my wife's 2012 iPad3. Such a disappointment. I will sell it, last Android device I buy.
    - skimpycompiler 11y ago
      Of course, root, without it I couldn't do a thing. I have Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 but older edition, battery is still fine, the OS got slow, even on factory reset, so, I decided to root it and runs much faster - pen use was not that great before, now it's perfect. Note that the act of rooting didn't have anything to do with the speed up, after installing a custom OS with GPU optimizations for drawing graphical elements it worked great.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I used to work at a place that gave everyone 2 machines for development: Their regular desktop, and a 5 year old machine, with a throttled internet connection. The programs had to be run on both. I wish more companies would do this. Especially in mobile. Sure, your site loads fast when your in a major downtown area, but try using your 30 different java-scripts when your in Nowheresville Alabama
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    This is a very good idea. Might as well just use a VM and throttle that as a test too.
- nilkn 11y ago
  I was recently basically forced to get a new phone because my Galaxy Note 3 had become virtually unusable from software updates over the past few years. Common tasks would freeze the phone for seconds at a time. All animations were laggy. It was as if it was running on 10-15 year old hardware, not 2 year old hardware. Just to be clear, I've experienced similar degradation with Apple products as well (specifically an older iPad), but never as severe as with the Note 3. My old iPad is still definitely useable; it's just not as smooth as it once was. The phone on the other hand had just become complete junk. Meanwhile my girlfriend's Nexus 5 phone has been on a roller coaster of battery life changes. Not too long ago, an update caused her battery life to drain to 0 in roughly half a day of light usage. Then it was fixed. Then it was ruined again in the update to Marshmallow. She's going to have to get a new phone as well because hers too has become nearly unusable.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Obsolescence as a Service! It can even be A-B tested to optimize the migration to new phones.
  - tonfa 11y ago
    Did you consider replacing the battery? (beside the battery not aging very well, I'm still happy with the N5 performance).
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      I agree. I damaged the charging port on my N5 and while it usually works, it occasionally doesn't and I didn't feel like depending on it. Still, I kept it around when I bought a Moto X last year and still fire it up occasionally and use it as a backup phone. I'm always surprised when I fire it up and (once it finishes syncing all of my email and stuff) it still runs great. I actually miss how the display is bonded to the glass so that there's just a little less of that barely perceived disconnect between my finger and the screen. Didn't think much of it but when I go back to the N5 it's a pleasant surprise. I feel like the last couple of years have seen mobile devices really hit a point where even a $350-400 device can remain useful for several years. Anything I own that's older (iPad2, Galaxy S2) ran like a dog within a couple of years.
- intoli 11y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, what kind of phone is it and how much did you pay? I have a 1st gen Moto X which is now over two years old and the tasks you mention feel pretty much instantaneous. I know that the Moto X was a high end phone when it came out but I bought it used last summer for $100 and I imagine that the specs were comparable to inexpensive new phones at the time.
  - sputr 11y ago
    It's a Samsung GT-I8260. I got it on contract (I was really low on cash and with a broken phone) and it was marked at 160€. It's not unlocked and not rooted. Cynogenmod is not supported for the device (as far as I know).
- driverdan 11y ago
  What phone? I have a Nexus 4 running Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop). It's three years old and still works just fine. Battery life has decreased a bit as expected. It has some quirks but overall performance is on par with when it was new.
kanzure 11y ago
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...
- roc 11y ago
  Don't all the browsers offer some implementation of 'cloud tabs', cloud bookmarks, and/or 'read later' sorts of features? Who needs copy/paste?
  - kanzure 11y ago
    Yes, but I am often looking at 10 or 20 things at the same time. I don't need to "read later", I need to read all of them now. I'll probably lose like half my trains of thought if I have to wait multiple seconds to switch back to page rendering one of the other umpteen search results... For tagged bookmarking I use jotmuch: https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch For more context, I almost always use my phone with this emergency pocket keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/ZAGG-FOLZKFLEXSLV-Zagg-ZAGGkeys-FLEX/dp/B00695OFE2 http://www.amazon.com/ZAGG-FOLZKFLEXSLV-Zagg-ZAGGkeys-FLEX/d... .. so I somewhat normal, high input rate.
    - roc 11y ago
      Well, yeah, at the scale of "real research" it doesn't really work. But you wouldn't want to do that on a tiny screen even if copy/paste was up to it. You probably wouldn't even want to do it on a laptop screen. That's just a tool/task mismatch.
- ParadigmBlender 11y ago
patsplat 11y ago
This seems a potentially shaky basis: > guessing that 50% of those corporate machines, ie 450m, can’t make Google searches
ddingus 11y ago
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. 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. 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... 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.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
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.
roymurdock 11y 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". 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. People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume. 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.
- charlesarthur 11y 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." The author (me) would love to, but Google makes very little data available. The only geographic data is total revenues broken down by US/UK/Rest of World. There's also revenue from "Google [search]", "platforms" and "other". Estimates about YouTube etc revenue tend to be calculations based on various private metrics. "I'd wager… that Google never planned to make much money from mobile search in the first place" Possible. As the article says, and has been repeated multiple times, Android was a defensive move to stop Microsoft cornering the mobile search field. "People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume." I must introduce you to some networks called "Instagram" and "Snapchat" and "Line" and "Weibo" and "WhatsApp".
tmaly 11y ago
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
pcl 11y ago
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.)
hagbardgroup 11y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
MIKarlsen 11y ago
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)? 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. 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.
- roc 11y ago
  Since when does search correlate to productivity? Communicating, managing projects, taking notes, reviewing/signing documents, sending payments, drafting designs, outlining documents, finding/ordering kit -- are these not productive? Yeah, you're probably not doing hardcore document creation, or real research, away from a keyboard, comfortable chair, and a nice big screen, but that's not the shape of all productivity.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    > Since when does search correlate to productivity? I think it's active vs. passive. You search to find something vs just consuming whatever Zuckerberg thinks you want to know about.
    - roc 11y ago
      Are taking notes, managing projects, sending emails, outlining documents, etc not active?
      - jonknee 11y ago
        No, but those activities are dwarfed by time spent passively consuming content on Facebook.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
chris_wot 11y ago
Uh? 1. 50% of people do one or more searches on mobile. That's awesome from Google's POV! 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. 3. Many, many people still don't use their phone for anything other than texting and phone calls. But here is the kicker: 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 for an entire month, then he's extrapolating that none of those mobile users do any searches per day for an entire month. 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. And if that's all his statistics are showing, then I'm not exactly blown away with this insight.
- mhurron 11y ago
  > Many, many people still don't use their phone for anything other than texting and phone calls. This is me, well except the texting part. I only have a smart phone for the occasional time I need navigation. The vast majority of days I use it to make one phone call. That navigation part makes the cost to upgrade every few years worth it though.
- charlesarthur 11y ago
  "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." From the article: "who does what searches isn’t fixed; so someone who did zero searches yesterday might do 10 tomorrow. But equally, the 10-searcher yesterday does none or one or four today. And so on." So yes. But on any given day, half of people don't do a mobile search. And the numbers from Google suggest that the average across a 30-day period is less than 30. If you think there should be a different model for how many people do how many searches than a Pareto distribution, please offer it.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    I probably need to re read your article, but where are you getting the assumption that 50% of people aren't doing searches on any given day? How do you know the spread of data isn't that there are 20% of users who don't use their mobile device for the Internet for 10 days in a row, but then do a lot of searches in a short space of time? Maybe I'm missing something here, but by taking an average over 30 days, you seem to assume that users do similar numbers of searches every day.
onion2k 11y ago
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). Fewer navigational searches would increase the proportion of monetisable searches; wouldn't that be a good thing for Google?
- hodwik 11y ago
  Navigational searches still display ads. (I'm told)
  - jonknee 11y ago
    A search for "Facebook" currently has no ads for me. Same for "Yahoo". They aren't making a killing on navigational searches.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      Are you sure you're not running adblock? Just did those searches and I see ads.
      - jonknee 11y ago
        Yes, that was in an Incognito window and there were plenty of ads for other SERPs. It's Google so it would vary based on tons of factors (user agent, location, if I have a cookie, etc etc).
  - onion2k 11y ago
    That doesn't matter if people don't click them. If someone is doing a navigational search they're overwhelmingly likely to click the first result. The amount of revenue navigational searches generate compared to all other searches must be negligible.
- deleted 11y ago
junto 11y ago
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. 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. 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"?
- 0xffff2 11y ago
  Unless Google has a policy saying no one else can advertise for the term "Facebook", Facebook has to advertise for it to prevent others from getting their ads in front of people who are looking for Facebook. Search the name of virtually any large company, and their website will come up as both the first real result and the banner ad at the top of the results.
  - lacker 11y ago
    Not true, as two seconds of research can demonstrate. Facebook does not advertise on Google for the term "Facebook". https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
    - junto 11y ago
      I guess that depends on your region?
  - JBiserkov 11y ago
    Exactly! See also the story about how Read Write Web wrote an article about Facebook&AOL and became the second result for "facebook login".
tom-lord 11y ago
I'm confused... How can the mode number of searches be 0.5?! "More people perform half a search every day, than any other amount." -- What?! I guess maybe that's more like "the mode over 30 days, divided by 30"?
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Precisely, this is some atrocious analysis by Charles Arthur.
  - coriny 11y ago
    I know _ad hominem_ is generally uncalled for, but he's not known for doing anything else. As the Guardian tech editor he had a reputation for showcasing (i.e. Boot Up, which got pretty toxic) and writing articles attacking Android. Most of it based on tedious market analysis.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      He had opinion pieces by Andrew Orlowski published in The Guardian, I think that says everything you need to know :-)
      - charlesarthur 11y ago
        The fact that you disagree with someone doesn't per se make them wrong.
        chris_wot 11y ago
        No, but I tend to consider people who call hardworking Wikipedia editors by the pejorative "wiki-fiddlers" less than reliable, and the man regularly wrote half-truths and sometimes resorted to outright dishonesty. That you would publish him... Well, that's your judgement but I consider it to be lacking.
    - charlesarthur 11y ago
MCRed 11y ago
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. 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. 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.
soylentcola 11y ago
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". 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.
- tluyben2 11y ago
  That is why I use my mobile; when I'm walking in the mountains during breaks in my head i'm working on things which I can do without sitting/standing behind my laptop which usually means researching things I don't know or that I could not get to work.
- lsaferite 11y ago
  That's how I feel as well. Having my phone on hand means I have an answer to almost every question. And I wonder about a lot of things. I really cannot count the number of times I'm driving talking to my wife and we get to a question neither can answer when "Ask Google" is my response. We use voice search on our phones a lot. A whole lot.
- dhimes 11y ago
  Serious question: have you ever made a purchase because of (indirectly or directly) an ad that appeared on a search page? (Maybe this should be an 'Ask HN')
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I know I have. I've gotten a job because an ad for a job search website that looked interesting, I've found out about new products and (after some of my own searching) purchased them, and i've definitely gone back to products i've left because of newly advertised features. (Microsoft Azure being one of them) I don't remember if these were specifically on a search page (chances are they weren't) but they were ads on the web.
akrymski 11y ago
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.
eitally 11y ago
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. If I were an investor, I might be worried about some aspects of Google, but this isn't one of them. I'm probably biased, though. I am constantly "ok googling" to learn stuff. Having young children will do that to you.
- Skunkleton 11y ago
  Also, it may just be an indication that Google Now is doing its job.
ForHackernews 11y ago
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?
bluedino 11y ago
I'm probably an outlier but I don't bother with that many apps on my iPhone. I just Google everything. Look up a movie? 'imdb spiderman' Want to know how many calories is in something? 'cinnabon calories' What's the football score? 'piggers score'
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Given that 50% of people do actually search, then I'd not say you are an outlier :-) The analysis behind this article is pretty bad.
jobu 11y ago
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?! 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.
annacollins 11y ago
That's absolutely right, with all the apps on mobile there is very little reason to search.
ucaetano 11y ago
There's a major problem with his calculation: the number of queries per month. The latest available number is from 2012: http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-year-212940 http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-y... That's 3 years ago.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Bloody hell, it's even worse than I thought. Even if that data was correct though, it's not showing what he is saying it shows.
  - charlesarthur 11y ago
    The figure given came from Google's Amit Singhal in October 2015.
noja 11y ago
I do tons more searches since voice recognition improved. I really like it. Google should push it harder.
Sven7 11y ago
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.
kawera 11y ago
Dupe detector not working? Same article posted yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414798
- striking 11y ago
  When an article doesn't get a lot of attention, it doesn't count as a dupe to repost it. (with caveats, of course.)
lawlessone 11y ago
Mobile just sucks to search for things on. It's far easier to move to desktop.
ausjke 11y ago
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.
eachro 11y ago
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.
Spooky23 11y ago
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. There are a significant number of users who need 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. 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.
rayvd 11y ago
For me (and as many have mentioned): - Browsing on the phone is kinda slow. Mostly unworkable unless you have a fairly new phone. - 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 huge difference.
- freehunter 11y ago
  Luckily both major platforms now allow ad blockers (as of iOS9).
stupejr 11y ago
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.
catshirt 11y ago
i'm not the type to call a title "misleading", and this is definitely not misleading in the traditional intentional sense... but, lets be clear here. a LOT more than "50% of people" do 0 searches per day. i mean seriously- wtf? "50% of people"? "more than half of all searches incoming to Google each month are from mobile" is the qualifier we are looking for.
jacquesm 11y ago
That's no surprise. 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. 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. 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.
- fokinsean 11y ago
  Then what explains relentless amount of texting people do during the day? I'm not sure if typing text is the barrier for people not using Google search.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    My texts tend to be cryptic and much abbreviated compared to emails. I know a few people that are able to respond with texts containing punctuation and such but those are the minority, the bulk of it is 'see you at 5' and 'pls bring yoghurt'.
    - swah 11y ago
      I hate typing on the cell but Swiftkey is really good...
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I'm pedantic about "punctuation and such" and spend some effort to do that on the phone as well, out of a habit and respect for the person on the other side, but I still rarely write long texts on a phone. I sometimes noticed it takes me 20 minutes (i.e. more than a half of the tram commute to work) to type a properly-formatted long-for e-mail, when the same task would take less than 5 minutes on PC, so I learned to leave such tasks to be done when I get my hands on a physical keyboard. I do text and IM all the time, but that's because phone is a tool for conversations, not because I like it. I always switch to PC as soon as I can.
rodion_89 11y 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: 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) That 1.28 for mobile is pretty close to the 1.23 quoted for desktop [1] https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-users-q2-2014/ https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-...
Zigurd 11y ago
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.
agentgt 11y ago
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. 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.
vicda 11y ago
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. 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.
a3n 11y ago
Ironic that by running their app store Google have contributed to this problem.
blowski 11y ago
Depends how you define search. 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. 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. 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.
dlsx 11y ago
Mobile sucks and is not the future, until they make a desk, chair, keyboard, and mouse that function with a phone, I will do my computing and searches from my desktop. This is a lesson to everyone who blindly follows trends, mobile and social are just a trend, and desktop computing is a staple. When will the Bay Area stop being so fucking stupid? Like all the startups, everyone in the SF area, is a fucking dipshit and they just follow trends. #fuckthebay
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  Yeah, everytime I post something to the effect that "PH0NES SUX" it gets downvoted into Oblivion. I hope AMD decides to forget this whole performance for watt thing and get the clocks north of 5GHz even if they have to build a water cooler into the socket, because everybody who wants a high-end Desktop has been frustrated for years.
- duderific 11y ago
  Mobile and desktop both have their place. I don't try to do any serious work on mobile, it is my after work and weekend device - if I need to lookup when/where a movie is playing, check reviews on a restaurant, or get directions somewhere, it's great. If I'm trying to write emails, or type comments on Hacker News, I'll use desktop. I agree the hype on mobile has been a bit overblown. Most folks who work in offices are on desktop ~8 hours a day so it's not going away anytime soon.
asgard1024 11y ago
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? 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!
- meeper16 11y ago
  Speaking of society, I'd be more concerned with growth problems in social networks like facebook, the next AOL and and former myspace. None have come anywhere near the revenue of Google and its because Google has been doing things are truly innovative and hard to duplicate algorithmically, scientifically and technically since its beginning unlike companies like facebook, friendster, twitter, myspace etc etc
- tormeh 11y ago
  Common tech bubble problem: Thinking everyone's talented, and the only thing separating us from greatness is distribution of tech.
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    No, I am not talking about talent at all! I am talking about the crap that is produced for consumers, that is intentionally making them less productive. Does my mother, for instance, deserve a text processor (MS Word) that cannot read save from one version to the next properly? Or doesn't she deserve a well researched UI (which actually was in the original MS Word!), instead of some modernist crap? Just because she is not a professional writer? These are all things that little by little improve productivity. Or take computers, how today you cannot even install an operating system on your device. People should have right to tinker. To prevent it is making people less able to do stuff, and the whole economy suffers as a consequence. You really think that Eastern Europeans, who during communism often had to resort to "doing to yourself", are more talented than Westerners? The point is great (or the best) technology doesn't require talent to improve productivity. Productivity improvements often stem from things that "just work".
Shivetya 11y ago
I would be much more likely to search on my phone if auto correct didn't. its to the point that its sometimes more frustration than useful
ionised 11y ago
If I'm at work, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop. If I'm at home I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop. If I'm travelling, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on Firefox Mobile on my Android phone (HTC One).
varelse 11y ago
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. In that context, I don't find this result particularly surprising.
programminggeek 11y ago
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. I think it's a different model and user behavior.
criddell 11y ago
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?
- scrollaway 11y ago
  It's a problem because the web is slowly being replaced by the mobile web for a lot of the population (that is, a majority of internet-connected people out there who only care about a few sites).
  - criddell 11y ago
    If my employer installs an espresso machine, it's not a problem for Budweiser because we were never going to be drinking beer at work anyway. If I pull out my phone, take a picture and post it to Facebook, Google hasn't lost out on any searches, unless you are counting when people type "Facebook" into the Google search box. Why does Google expect people to be doing creating a lot of search queries on their phones? (I assume a laptop isn't counted as a mobile device) I could understand if people were using Bing on their phones, but they aren't. Google doesn't expect people to search on their television so maybe they should stop expecting people to search with their phone.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      What you are talking about is the lost sale fallacy and it does apply here but not entirely. Google is right to be worried. The mobile web isn't merely adding to the current web, it is slowly replacing large parts of it, so they absolutely will be affected. Google doesn't give a crap about people searching on their TVs because that isn't replacing anything.
      - criddell 11y ago
        The article talks specifically about searches though, not that people are using the internet without seeing ads. A lot of mobile usage is people scrolling through their Facebook feed. They aren't searching via another channel and so Google isn't missing out on anything. I can see the argument that using a Yelp app for example might replace what used to be a Google search, but even on the desktop I think people are learning to use vertical search engines. From a growth point of view, the game may be over for Google but that doesn't mean they don't have a lot of profitable years ahead of them still.
izzydata 11y ago
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. I probably do less than 10 mobile google searches per year.
richmarr 11y ago
Yeah, searching on a mobile keyboard is a pain. Hence the huge push to intelligent agents (Siri, Now, Cortana). We're currently in the unfortunate position to be using mobile devices heavily but not yet having decent intelligent agents. 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: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512 https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512
yo-code-sucks 11y ago
It means we're sick of Googles shit. Fi is a great example of Google gone wrong, you cancel and then you get non-stop emails about missed payments even though they owe you. Then there's Android, I loved android, and they done fucked it up, so much that a brand new Nexus in my hand for a month made me switch to iPhone. Overall I have this disgust for where they're headed as a company, and it is not good.
mrb 11y ago
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. 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. 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. 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). [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-searches-surpass-those-on-pcs/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-se... [2] https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-base-worldwide https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-ba... (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).
- charlesarthur 11y ago
  Thanks for your comments. #1 Android tablets are an interesting one. Do we think people are more active in terms of Google searches on Android tablets than on Android phones or desktop? I'd suggest they're less active (in searching terms) than on desktop. Than mobile - well, the received wisdom is that Android tablets are largely used for consuming video, particularly in Asia, which is where a lot of them are. It's an oversight on my part, I agree, but I'm not sure they make a big difference. #2 Gartner revised its calculation for the PC base earlier this year - if you followed my linkblog you'd have seen the reference to its latest calculation [1] which puts the number at 1.48bn in 2015, falling constantly towards 1.38bn in 2019. That might get revised, of course, but the 2015 figure is probably accurate.
  - charlesarthur 11y ago
    Ooops, left out the link to Gartner. It's this: http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/windows-10-does-not-change-the-pcs-fate/ http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/windows-10-does-no...
pervycreeper 11y ago
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?
ctstover 11y ago
How will this impact the time table to reach the googleplex singularity godhead? ... 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?
alkonaut 11y ago
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? 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.
skrowl 11y ago
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.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
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.
arbuge 11y ago
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...
logicallee 11y ago
this article seems very fishy to me. But can someone interpret this graph for me - https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-2015-10-19-14-10-44.png https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-... ? 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?
Kluny 11y ago
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.
libraryatnight 11y ago
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.
vthallam 11y ago
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! 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. Having said that, i am not sure how Google would deal with iOS devices.
shostack 11y ago
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.
nsmalch 11y ago
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
mark_l_watson 11y ago
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?). 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.
reoo 11y ago
If Google has that problem, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines have the same(or worse) problem
kraig911 11y ago
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.

270 points by adidash 11y ago

sputr 11y ago

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. 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.

maxerickson 11y ago
I just bought a 2015 Moto G (the 8GB/1GB model, to use without a data plan). It works much better than you describe. Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end?
- dangrossman 11y ago
  You can pick up any of a dozen Android phones for $20 at Wal-Mart [1]. That's the low end. $200 is a big expense for most people. 1: http://www.walmart.com/browse/cell-phones/shop-all-no-contract-phones/1105910_1072335_1056206?sort=price_low http://www.walmart.com/browse/cell-phones/shop-all-no-contra...
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Those are all carrier locked, so the actual cost of the phone might be higher than the retail price. I don't think net10 is spending huge dollars making their phones cheap, but I'm sure they spend a bit.
    - fein 11y ago
      Yes but unfortunately people look at up front costs and not end costs. $200 to someone living in poverty is more than a month of food, while $20 up front + $40/ month for a baseline limited text and call plan seems far more manageable.
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        My point was that the value of the hardware may not be reflected in the retail price of the phone, the purchasing psychology doesn't matter there. It seems that there are lots of ~$100 (or less) phones shipping though, and they are quite a bit less capable than the one I bought.
- creshal 11y ago
  > Is $200 unlocked not what you mean by low end? You get reasonable (unlocked!) Android phones for as little as $100, and entry-level ones for a lot less. Low end is really, really low nowadays. Edit: The cheapest I could find: http://www.alcatelonetouch.com/global-en/products/detail?model=POP%20C2 http://www.alcatelonetouch.com/global-en/products/detail?mod... Sells for less than 50€ unlocked.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
skimpycompiler 11y ago
I have a 4 year old phone. Without all of the kernel optimizations, forced removal of Google App and Google Play Services, I wouldn't be able to do anything. My battery lasts 4 days of normal use. Before my changes it couldn't last 10 hours. So much amateurish bloat. I'm baffled by those engineers.
- Elessar 11y ago
  Don't be baffled. Engineering is driven by business direction, and the creation of an upgrade cycle is beneficial for the entire Android ecosystem. You are not the customer they want.
  - legulere 11y ago
    This has nothing to do with an upgrade cycle. Optimisation costs engineering time which is quite pricy. So it's an easy way to cut costs.
  - skimpycompiler 11y ago
    > You are not the customer they want. That's true. Then I'd say I just don't like the engineering they are doing.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  How did you force remove the Google apps and Google Play Services? Did this require root? I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition that I bought in February, and it lasts nowhere as long as my wife's 2012 iPad3. Such a disappointment. I will sell it, last Android device I buy.
  - skimpycompiler 11y ago
    Of course, root, without it I couldn't do a thing. I have Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 but older edition, battery is still fine, the OS got slow, even on factory reset, so, I decided to root it and runs much faster - pen use was not that great before, now it's perfect. Note that the act of rooting didn't have anything to do with the speed up, after installing a custom OS with GPU optimizations for drawing graphical elements it worked great.
CaptSpify 11y ago
I used to work at a place that gave everyone 2 machines for development: Their regular desktop, and a 5 year old machine, with a throttled internet connection. The programs had to be run on both. I wish more companies would do this. Especially in mobile. Sure, your site loads fast when your in a major downtown area, but try using your 30 different java-scripts when your in Nowheresville Alabama
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  This is a very good idea. Might as well just use a VM and throttle that as a test too.
nilkn 11y ago
I was recently basically forced to get a new phone because my Galaxy Note 3 had become virtually unusable from software updates over the past few years. Common tasks would freeze the phone for seconds at a time. All animations were laggy. It was as if it was running on 10-15 year old hardware, not 2 year old hardware. Just to be clear, I've experienced similar degradation with Apple products as well (specifically an older iPad), but never as severe as with the Note 3. My old iPad is still definitely useable; it's just not as smooth as it once was. The phone on the other hand had just become complete junk. Meanwhile my girlfriend's Nexus 5 phone has been on a roller coaster of battery life changes. Not too long ago, an update caused her battery life to drain to 0 in roughly half a day of light usage. Then it was fixed. Then it was ruined again in the update to Marshmallow. She's going to have to get a new phone as well because hers too has become nearly unusable.
- walterbell 11y ago
  Obsolescence as a Service! It can even be A-B tested to optimize the migration to new phones.
- tonfa 11y ago
  Did you consider replacing the battery? (beside the battery not aging very well, I'm still happy with the N5 performance).
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    I agree. I damaged the charging port on my N5 and while it usually works, it occasionally doesn't and I didn't feel like depending on it. Still, I kept it around when I bought a Moto X last year and still fire it up occasionally and use it as a backup phone. I'm always surprised when I fire it up and (once it finishes syncing all of my email and stuff) it still runs great. I actually miss how the display is bonded to the glass so that there's just a little less of that barely perceived disconnect between my finger and the screen. Didn't think much of it but when I go back to the N5 it's a pleasant surprise. I feel like the last couple of years have seen mobile devices really hit a point where even a $350-400 device can remain useful for several years. Anything I own that's older (iPad2, Galaxy S2) ran like a dog within a couple of years.
intoli 11y ago
If you don't mind sharing, what kind of phone is it and how much did you pay? I have a 1st gen Moto X which is now over two years old and the tasks you mention feel pretty much instantaneous. I know that the Moto X was a high end phone when it came out but I bought it used last summer for $100 and I imagine that the specs were comparable to inexpensive new phones at the time.
- sputr 11y ago
  It's a Samsung GT-I8260. I got it on contract (I was really low on cash and with a broken phone) and it was marked at 160€. It's not unlocked and not rooted. Cynogenmod is not supported for the device (as far as I know).
driverdan 11y ago
What phone? I have a Nexus 4 running Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop). It's three years old and still works just fine. Battery life has decreased a bit as expected. It has some quirks but overall performance is on par with when it was new.

kanzure 11y ago

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...

roc 11y ago
Don't all the browsers offer some implementation of 'cloud tabs', cloud bookmarks, and/or 'read later' sorts of features? Who needs copy/paste?
- kanzure 11y ago
  Yes, but I am often looking at 10 or 20 things at the same time. I don't need to "read later", I need to read all of them now. I'll probably lose like half my trains of thought if I have to wait multiple seconds to switch back to page rendering one of the other umpteen search results... For tagged bookmarking I use jotmuch: https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch For more context, I almost always use my phone with this emergency pocket keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/ZAGG-FOLZKFLEXSLV-Zagg-ZAGGkeys-FLEX/dp/B00695OFE2 http://www.amazon.com/ZAGG-FOLZKFLEXSLV-Zagg-ZAGGkeys-FLEX/d... .. so I somewhat normal, high input rate.
  - roc 11y ago
    Well, yeah, at the scale of "real research" it doesn't really work. But you wouldn't want to do that on a tiny screen even if copy/paste was up to it. You probably wouldn't even want to do it on a laptop screen. That's just a tool/task mismatch.
ParadigmBlender 11y ago

patsplat 11y ago

This seems a potentially shaky basis: > guessing that 50% of those corporate machines, ie 450m, can’t make Google searches

ddingus 11y ago

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. 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. 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... 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.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

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.

roymurdock 11y 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". 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. People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume. 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.

charlesarthur 11y 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." The author (me) would love to, but Google makes very little data available. The only geographic data is total revenues broken down by US/UK/Rest of World. There's also revenue from "Google [search]", "platforms" and "other". Estimates about YouTube etc revenue tend to be calculations based on various private metrics. "I'd wager… that Google never planned to make much money from mobile search in the first place" Possible. As the article says, and has been repeated multiple times, Android was a defensive move to stop Microsoft cornering the mobile search field. "People don't explore on their smartphones: they consume." I must introduce you to some networks called "Instagram" and "Snapchat" and "Line" and "Weibo" and "WhatsApp".

tmaly 11y ago

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

pcl 11y ago

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.)

hagbardgroup 11y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

MIKarlsen 11y ago

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)? 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. 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.

roc 11y ago
Since when does search correlate to productivity? Communicating, managing projects, taking notes, reviewing/signing documents, sending payments, drafting designs, outlining documents, finding/ordering kit -- are these not productive? Yeah, you're probably not doing hardcore document creation, or real research, away from a keyboard, comfortable chair, and a nice big screen, but that's not the shape of all productivity.
- jonknee 11y ago
  > Since when does search correlate to productivity? I think it's active vs. passive. You search to find something vs just consuming whatever Zuckerberg thinks you want to know about.
  - roc 11y ago
    Are taking notes, managing projects, sending emails, outlining documents, etc not active?
    - jonknee 11y ago
      No, but those activities are dwarfed by time spent passively consuming content on Facebook.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

chris_wot 11y ago

Uh? 1. 50% of people do one or more searches on mobile. That's awesome from Google's POV! 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. 3. Many, many people still don't use their phone for anything other than texting and phone calls. But here is the kicker: 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 for an entire month, then he's extrapolating that none of those mobile users do any searches per day for an entire month. 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. And if that's all his statistics are showing, then I'm not exactly blown away with this insight.

mhurron 11y ago
> Many, many people still don't use their phone for anything other than texting and phone calls. This is me, well except the texting part. I only have a smart phone for the occasional time I need navigation. The vast majority of days I use it to make one phone call. That navigation part makes the cost to upgrade every few years worth it though.
charlesarthur 11y ago
"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." From the article: "who does what searches isn’t fixed; so someone who did zero searches yesterday might do 10 tomorrow. But equally, the 10-searcher yesterday does none or one or four today. And so on." So yes. But on any given day, half of people don't do a mobile search. And the numbers from Google suggest that the average across a 30-day period is less than 30. If you think there should be a different model for how many people do how many searches than a Pareto distribution, please offer it.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I probably need to re read your article, but where are you getting the assumption that 50% of people aren't doing searches on any given day? How do you know the spread of data isn't that there are 20% of users who don't use their mobile device for the Internet for 10 days in a row, but then do a lot of searches in a short space of time? Maybe I'm missing something here, but by taking an average over 30 days, you seem to assume that users do similar numbers of searches every day.

onion2k 11y ago

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). Fewer navigational searches would increase the proportion of monetisable searches; wouldn't that be a good thing for Google?

hodwik 11y ago
Navigational searches still display ads. (I'm told)
- jonknee 11y ago
  A search for "Facebook" currently has no ads for me. Same for "Yahoo". They aren't making a killing on navigational searches.
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Are you sure you're not running adblock? Just did those searches and I see ads.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Yes, that was in an Incognito window and there were plenty of ads for other SERPs. It's Google so it would vary based on tons of factors (user agent, location, if I have a cookie, etc etc).
- onion2k 11y ago
  That doesn't matter if people don't click them. If someone is doing a navigational search they're overwhelmingly likely to click the first result. The amount of revenue navigational searches generate compared to all other searches must be negligible.
deleted 11y ago

junto 11y ago

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. 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. 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"?

0xffff2 11y ago
Unless Google has a policy saying no one else can advertise for the term "Facebook", Facebook has to advertise for it to prevent others from getting their ads in front of people who are looking for Facebook. Search the name of virtually any large company, and their website will come up as both the first real result and the banner ad at the top of the results.
- lacker 11y ago
  Not true, as two seconds of research can demonstrate. Facebook does not advertise on Google for the term "Facebook". https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
  - junto 11y ago
    I guess that depends on your region?
- JBiserkov 11y ago
  Exactly! See also the story about how Read Write Web wrote an article about Facebook&AOL and became the second result for "facebook login".

tom-lord 11y ago

I'm confused... How can the mode number of searches be 0.5?! "More people perform half a search every day, than any other amount." -- What?! I guess maybe that's more like "the mode over 30 days, divided by 30"?

chris_wot 11y ago
Precisely, this is some atrocious analysis by Charles Arthur.
- coriny 11y ago
  I know _ad hominem_ is generally uncalled for, but he's not known for doing anything else. As the Guardian tech editor he had a reputation for showcasing (i.e. Boot Up, which got pretty toxic) and writing articles attacking Android. Most of it based on tedious market analysis.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    He had opinion pieces by Andrew Orlowski published in The Guardian, I think that says everything you need to know :-)
    - charlesarthur 11y ago
      The fact that you disagree with someone doesn't per se make them wrong.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        No, but I tend to consider people who call hardworking Wikipedia editors by the pejorative "wiki-fiddlers" less than reliable, and the man regularly wrote half-truths and sometimes resorted to outright dishonesty. That you would publish him... Well, that's your judgement but I consider it to be lacking.
  - charlesarthur 11y ago

MCRed 11y ago

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. 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. 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.

soylentcola 11y ago

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". 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.

tluyben2 11y ago
That is why I use my mobile; when I'm walking in the mountains during breaks in my head i'm working on things which I can do without sitting/standing behind my laptop which usually means researching things I don't know or that I could not get to work.
lsaferite 11y ago
That's how I feel as well. Having my phone on hand means I have an answer to almost every question. And I wonder about a lot of things. I really cannot count the number of times I'm driving talking to my wife and we get to a question neither can answer when "Ask Google" is my response. We use voice search on our phones a lot. A whole lot.
dhimes 11y ago
Serious question: have you ever made a purchase because of (indirectly or directly) an ad that appeared on a search page? (Maybe this should be an 'Ask HN')
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I know I have. I've gotten a job because an ad for a job search website that looked interesting, I've found out about new products and (after some of my own searching) purchased them, and i've definitely gone back to products i've left because of newly advertised features. (Microsoft Azure being one of them) I don't remember if these were specifically on a search page (chances are they weren't) but they were ads on the web.

akrymski 11y ago

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.

eitally 11y ago

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. If I were an investor, I might be worried about some aspects of Google, but this isn't one of them. I'm probably biased, though. I am constantly "ok googling" to learn stuff. Having young children will do that to you.

Skunkleton 11y ago
Also, it may just be an indication that Google Now is doing its job.

ForHackernews 11y ago

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?

bluedino 11y ago

I'm probably an outlier but I don't bother with that many apps on my iPhone. I just Google everything. Look up a movie? 'imdb spiderman' Want to know how many calories is in something? 'cinnabon calories' What's the football score? 'piggers score'

chris_wot 11y ago
Given that 50% of people do actually search, then I'd not say you are an outlier :-) The analysis behind this article is pretty bad.

jobu 11y ago

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?! 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.

annacollins 11y ago

That's absolutely right, with all the apps on mobile there is very little reason to search.

ucaetano 11y ago

There's a major problem with his calculation: the number of queries per month. The latest available number is from 2012: http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-year-212940 http://searchengineland.com/google-1-trillion-searches-per-y... That's 3 years ago.

chris_wot 11y ago
Bloody hell, it's even worse than I thought. Even if that data was correct though, it's not showing what he is saying it shows.
- charlesarthur 11y ago
  The figure given came from Google's Amit Singhal in October 2015.

noja 11y ago

I do tons more searches since voice recognition improved. I really like it. Google should push it harder.

Sven7 11y ago

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.

kawera 11y ago

Dupe detector not working? Same article posted yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414798

striking 11y ago
When an article doesn't get a lot of attention, it doesn't count as a dupe to repost it. (with caveats, of course.)

lawlessone 11y ago

Mobile just sucks to search for things on. It's far easier to move to desktop.

ausjke 11y ago

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.

eachro 11y ago

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.

Spooky23 11y ago

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. There are a significant number of users who need 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. 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.

rayvd 11y ago

For me (and as many have mentioned): - Browsing on the phone is kinda slow. Mostly unworkable unless you have a fairly new phone. - 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 huge difference.

freehunter 11y ago
Luckily both major platforms now allow ad blockers (as of iOS9).

stupejr 11y ago

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.

catshirt 11y ago

i'm not the type to call a title "misleading", and this is definitely not misleading in the traditional intentional sense... but, lets be clear here. a LOT more than "50% of people" do 0 searches per day. i mean seriously- wtf? "50% of people"? "more than half of all searches incoming to Google each month are from mobile" is the qualifier we are looking for.

jacquesm 11y ago

That's no surprise. 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. 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. 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.

fokinsean 11y ago
Then what explains relentless amount of texting people do during the day? I'm not sure if typing text is the barrier for people not using Google search.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  My texts tend to be cryptic and much abbreviated compared to emails. I know a few people that are able to respond with texts containing punctuation and such but those are the minority, the bulk of it is 'see you at 5' and 'pls bring yoghurt'.
  - swah 11y ago
    I hate typing on the cell but Swiftkey is really good...
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I'm pedantic about "punctuation and such" and spend some effort to do that on the phone as well, out of a habit and respect for the person on the other side, but I still rarely write long texts on a phone. I sometimes noticed it takes me 20 minutes (i.e. more than a half of the tram commute to work) to type a properly-formatted long-for e-mail, when the same task would take less than 5 minutes on PC, so I learned to leave such tasks to be done when I get my hands on a physical keyboard. I do text and IM all the time, but that's because phone is a tool for conversations, not because I like it. I always switch to PC as soon as I can.

rodion_89 11y 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: 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) That 1.28 for mobile is pretty close to the 1.23 quoted for desktop [1] https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-users-q2-2014/ https://www.techinasia.com/china-386-million-active-android-...

Zigurd 11y ago

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.

agentgt 11y ago

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. 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.

vicda 11y ago

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. 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.

a3n 11y ago

Ironic that by running their app store Google have contributed to this problem.

blowski 11y ago

Depends how you define search. 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. 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. 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.

dlsx 11y ago

Mobile sucks and is not the future, until they make a desk, chair, keyboard, and mouse that function with a phone, I will do my computing and searches from my desktop. This is a lesson to everyone who blindly follows trends, mobile and social are just a trend, and desktop computing is a staple. When will the Bay Area stop being so fucking stupid? Like all the startups, everyone in the SF area, is a fucking dipshit and they just follow trends. #fuckthebay

PaulHoule 11y ago
Yeah, everytime I post something to the effect that "PH0NES SUX" it gets downvoted into Oblivion. I hope AMD decides to forget this whole performance for watt thing and get the clocks north of 5GHz even if they have to build a water cooler into the socket, because everybody who wants a high-end Desktop has been frustrated for years.
duderific 11y ago
Mobile and desktop both have their place. I don't try to do any serious work on mobile, it is my after work and weekend device - if I need to lookup when/where a movie is playing, check reviews on a restaurant, or get directions somewhere, it's great. If I'm trying to write emails, or type comments on Hacker News, I'll use desktop. I agree the hype on mobile has been a bit overblown. Most folks who work in offices are on desktop ~8 hours a day so it's not going away anytime soon.

asgard1024 11y ago

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? 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!

meeper16 11y ago
Speaking of society, I'd be more concerned with growth problems in social networks like facebook, the next AOL and and former myspace. None have come anywhere near the revenue of Google and its because Google has been doing things are truly innovative and hard to duplicate algorithmically, scientifically and technically since its beginning unlike companies like facebook, friendster, twitter, myspace etc etc
tormeh 11y ago
Common tech bubble problem: Thinking everyone's talented, and the only thing separating us from greatness is distribution of tech.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  No, I am not talking about talent at all! I am talking about the crap that is produced for consumers, that is intentionally making them less productive. Does my mother, for instance, deserve a text processor (MS Word) that cannot read save from one version to the next properly? Or doesn't she deserve a well researched UI (which actually was in the original MS Word!), instead of some modernist crap? Just because she is not a professional writer? These are all things that little by little improve productivity. Or take computers, how today you cannot even install an operating system on your device. People should have right to tinker. To prevent it is making people less able to do stuff, and the whole economy suffers as a consequence. You really think that Eastern Europeans, who during communism often had to resort to "doing to yourself", are more talented than Westerners? The point is great (or the best) technology doesn't require talent to improve productivity. Productivity improvements often stem from things that "just work".

Shivetya 11y ago

I would be much more likely to search on my phone if auto correct didn't. its to the point that its sometimes more frustration than useful

ionised 11y ago

If I'm at work, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop. If I'm at home I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on my desktop. If I'm travelling, I'm searching using DuckDuckGo on Firefox Mobile on my Android phone (HTC One).

varelse 11y ago

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. In that context, I don't find this result particularly surprising.

programminggeek 11y ago

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. I think it's a different model and user behavior.

criddell 11y ago

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?

scrollaway 11y ago
It's a problem because the web is slowly being replaced by the mobile web for a lot of the population (that is, a majority of internet-connected people out there who only care about a few sites).
- criddell 11y ago
  If my employer installs an espresso machine, it's not a problem for Budweiser because we were never going to be drinking beer at work anyway. If I pull out my phone, take a picture and post it to Facebook, Google hasn't lost out on any searches, unless you are counting when people type "Facebook" into the Google search box. Why does Google expect people to be doing creating a lot of search queries on their phones? (I assume a laptop isn't counted as a mobile device) I could understand if people were using Bing on their phones, but they aren't. Google doesn't expect people to search on their television so maybe they should stop expecting people to search with their phone.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    What you are talking about is the lost sale fallacy and it does apply here but not entirely. Google is right to be worried. The mobile web isn't merely adding to the current web, it is slowly replacing large parts of it, so they absolutely will be affected. Google doesn't give a crap about people searching on their TVs because that isn't replacing anything.
    - criddell 11y ago
      The article talks specifically about searches though, not that people are using the internet without seeing ads. A lot of mobile usage is people scrolling through their Facebook feed. They aren't searching via another channel and so Google isn't missing out on anything. I can see the argument that using a Yelp app for example might replace what used to be a Google search, but even on the desktop I think people are learning to use vertical search engines. From a growth point of view, the game may be over for Google but that doesn't mean they don't have a lot of profitable years ahead of them still.

izzydata 11y ago

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. I probably do less than 10 mobile google searches per year.

richmarr 11y ago

Yeah, searching on a mobile keyboard is a pain. Hence the huge push to intelligent agents (Siri, Now, Cortana). We're currently in the unfortunate position to be using mobile devices heavily but not yet having decent intelligent agents. 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: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512 https://twitter.com/swardley/status/641206424840896512

yo-code-sucks 11y ago

It means we're sick of Googles shit. Fi is a great example of Google gone wrong, you cancel and then you get non-stop emails about missed payments even though they owe you. Then there's Android, I loved android, and they done fucked it up, so much that a brand new Nexus in my hand for a month made me switch to iPhone. Overall I have this disgust for where they're headed as a company, and it is not good.

mrb 11y ago

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. 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. 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. 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). [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-searches-surpass-those-on-pcs/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/08/google-says-mobile-se... [2] https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-base-worldwide https://www.gartner.com/doc/1602818/forecast-pc-installed-ba... (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).

charlesarthur 11y ago
Thanks for your comments. #1 Android tablets are an interesting one. Do we think people are more active in terms of Google searches on Android tablets than on Android phones or desktop? I'd suggest they're less active (in searching terms) than on desktop. Than mobile - well, the received wisdom is that Android tablets are largely used for consuming video, particularly in Asia, which is where a lot of them are. It's an oversight on my part, I agree, but I'm not sure they make a big difference. #2 Gartner revised its calculation for the PC base earlier this year - if you followed my linkblog you'd have seen the reference to its latest calculation [1] which puts the number at 1.48bn in 2015, falling constantly towards 1.38bn in 2019. That might get revised, of course, but the 2015 figure is probably accurate.
- charlesarthur 11y ago
  Ooops, left out the link to Gartner. It's this: http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/windows-10-does-not-change-the-pcs-fate/ http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/windows-10-does-no...

pervycreeper 11y ago

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?

ctstover 11y ago

How will this impact the time table to reach the googleplex singularity godhead? ... 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?

alkonaut 11y ago

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? 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.

skrowl 11y ago

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.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

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.

arbuge 11y ago

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...

logicallee 11y ago

this article seems very fishy to me. But can someone interpret this graph for me - https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-2015-10-19-14-10-44.png https://theoverspill.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/screenshot-... ? 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?

Kluny 11y ago

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.

libraryatnight 11y ago

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.

vthallam 11y ago

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! 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. Having said that, i am not sure how Google would deal with iOS devices.

shostack 11y ago

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.

nsmalch 11y ago

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

mark_l_watson 11y ago

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?). 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.

reoo 11y ago

If Google has that problem, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines have the same(or worse) problem

kraig911 11y ago

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.