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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 m

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.
      - roc 11y ago
        For some users, sure. But that'd be about the user, not the platform. And more specifically, that'd probably be mostly about the time and place of use, not even the user. If those same people had a 27" screen during that same slice of time and space, they'd probably be doing the same thing.
- Retric 11y ago
  'finding/ordering kit' How is that not search?
  - roc 11y ago
    When you already know which vendors you're using. If we get our misc bits from newegg, I might search newegg, but I don't need google.
- scholia 11y ago
  > Since when does search correlate to productivity? When you're a journalist ;-)
n0us 11y ago
I search more on my Android compared to my (former) iPhone but as my Galaxy S4 ages it has becoming increasingly slow to open the search app and slow to open the browser. Sometimes I avoid searching entirely just because the latency is too much work and involves jumping between the search app and chrome/firefox.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  I'm curious but do you ever just search in the browser (skipping the separate search app)? I only ask because it never really occurs to me to use a second app to search when both Chrome and (my default) Firefox let you type in the URL bar to search directly. Same results, less steps and app switching.
  - bgilroy26 11y ago
    I'm the same way. I'm on a galaxy s4 and I probably use the home screen search bar 2-3 times a week, Chrome search 4-5+ times a day. For no discernable reason, I have never gotten into using voice commands for everything.
  - n0us 11y ago
    I do search in the browser and this is generally quicker although part of the reason I search more often is the search box widget that I have on every home screen. Lack of support for true widgets is really an unfortunate gap in the iPhone experience for me but I may switch back for the next two years anyway as I'm not really a fanboy in either direction.
jerf 11y ago
There are studies that suggest that teams that take time out of the day to joke and laugh with each other are still more productive than the teams that are heads down all the time. (I'm grateful my natural inclination has proved out to be a good use of time, but now I don't even feel guilty about it, which is nice.) If we were robots or Vulcans, perhaps socialization is a net loss, but for humans in general it is not. If you are trying to optimize your productivity, removing social contact is not necessarily moving in the right direction; the productivity optimum is not "zero social contact". Of course "social networks" may be low-grade or negative socialization. Perhaps the fact it is "low-calorie" social interaction causes people to spend too much time on it when they could do better by other mechanisms. I don't know, really. I'm just pointing out that assuming social == not producing value is an oversimplification, if you're a human being.
- bad_user 11y ago
  I don't consider social networking to be about social contact, because the physical contact is missing and most of the time we aren't even talking with our "friends" on these social networks. A "like" or a retweet is not a dialog. Phone calls, SMS messages, IRC chats or even emails are way more healthy than whatever happens on social networks because they are bidirectional. And I'm not even speaking about the magic that happens when shaking somebody's hand or when receiving a smile.
  - eggie 11y ago
    Yesterday I realized that it has been a long time since an old friend reached out by email to ask how I was doing. I still do, but I also don't use the most popular social media channels. I wonder if the simulation of contact provided by broadcast-style social media is enough to satiate the need to reach out and make direct contact. Perhaps I should delete my page from facebook. Despite the fact it hasn't been touched in four years it might give people the impression that they know how I am. It is easier to find me by actively searching for my name on the web. Then, even if one does this I've heard that facebook will sometimes make a stub page from media they have available to stand in. It feels like a nightmarish trap in which we train machines to supplant ourselves.
pachydermic 11y ago
I think apps have just done a good job keeping you in their little walled garden - they don't want you browsing the web, checking other pages, etc. They want your eyeballs on their screen so they can sell ads. I think it's easy in theory (and probably hard in practice) to solve this problem. Google just needs to reduce the friction of web searches. I think they've gone a long way to achieving this goal on Android 6.0. For the uninitiated, they added that weird hold to search which automatically picks stuff out from the screen to search and often presents results in a way where it's really easy to switch back to what you were originally looking at. Imagine if all you had to do was think about something to initiate a google search. Okay, that would probably get pretty dystopian but it would let you do many more searches even while your screen has been abducted by an app. I think all google needs to do is reduce the frictions to search.
- totalrobe 11y ago
  On my phone, the google search is top and center on my home screen. Literally all it takes to search is one click and you can start typing or talking. I've got a motorola so I can also just start talking with my keyphrase and it will search...can't really get any easier.
friednslip 11y ago
this is interesting, it does explain why now on tap is such an important feature for Marshmallow. lets you cross check without switching out of the app
legulere 11y ago
There are also some productive things that are doable with mobile devices. For me that is learning flash cards with Anki and data acquisition for openstreetmap (house numbers, etc.). The problems they have is usually the small screen that makes it hard to view much content at once and that text input is really burdensome. Some tasks require these and are thus not suitable for the mobile devices. They however also have advantages to be usable in many situations computers aren't (for using a computer while standing you need a special desk while you can use the mobile devices in almost every position and place) and touch input may be better for some tasks. For stuff that would be possible both for computers and for mobile devices equally good there's the barrier that it's already been developed for computers and that everybody needing it for work already uses a computer, so you would need to put a unbearable mass of work into it to bring it to already is with computers today.
chris_wot 11y ago
Or it could indicate that Charles Arthur's analysis of the data provided by Google is flawed and so using it to speculate on productivity is a bit of a fool's errand :-) (See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419034 for my reasoning)
- sangnoir 11y ago
  Is this the same Charles Arthur who contributes to The Grauniad[1]? If it is the same person, then I am not surprised by the lack of cogency. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    It is. I've actually disagreed with him in the past in some obscure correspondence I sent him (so minor he won't recall it!), but he's not always wrong :-)
- charlesarthur 11y ago
  I've responded to your comment there. Obviously, the data is open to lots of interpretations. I tried to use models that seem reasonable and reflect what we know about internet behaviour - particularly the Pareto distribution of most activities.
gdulli 11y ago
It's not inherent to mobile, but the form that smartphones have taken. I remember owning a Treo way back and at that time, a phone was something I could easily compose text and be productive on. Ever since my first smartphone with a touch screen keyboard I've thought of the phone as something to read or play games on. Entering text has become enough of a chore that I stopped thinking of a phone as a productivity tool. It's good at keeping me entertained on the subway or being a music player, but that's it.
- hammock 11y ago
  Do you have an iPhone? I use the OK Google voice search feature all the time on my phone.
  - josteink 11y ago
    People outside the US probably don't find any voice-assisted tools productive at all. TLDR: They all suck. Terribly. Assuming your users will fall back to voice-search is not an assumption you should make without having the data to support it.
    - realusername 11y ago
      Yep indeed, French here, it's not even an option currently. Maybe in the future it will improve but for now it only works in theory.
      - codecamper 11y ago
        you can definitely voice search in French on Google. Heck.. voice search in Hungarian works pretty well.
        chebastian 11y ago
        Swede here, and yes it works in swedish to, not just works its actually usable. Havent tried to write a swedish sms with it but just saying "hitta närmaste butik" will give me the closest groverystores nearby and so on.
ams6110 11y ago
Interesting. I have an android phone, and I never noticed the google search bar. I just looked and yes, there it is. I've never used it.
- bhauer 11y ago
  Ha! I had an Android phone for years and never used the search bar. And yet, it's the most prominent feature in view whenever you see a "glamour shot" of a new Android device. It's a Google OS, so of course it's got to have a prominent search bar! But I never once used it—I suppose reinforcing the findings of this article. The ugliness (both visually and metaphorically) of a big Google search bar on the home screen of my phone is one reason I dropped Android.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    It's not the only reason but it's one reason I don't use their launcher. Thankfully, it's dead simple to use a different one and doesn't require any weird hacks or jailbreaking. Nova Launcher is the closest thing I've found to an "ideal" Android launcher. Superficially looks the same by default but you can enable or disable the search bar, the persistent Google Now on the leftmost page (seriously, swiping up has always worked just fine for opening Now), and fixing their odd insistence on having so few rows/columns of icons and widgets when screens keep getting larger and higher-resolution. I understand that you no longer use an Android device but hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who happens to read the comments and has similar wants. There are other launchers but I haven't kept up with them in a while since finding one that works best for me. Seriously though, how is this: http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png supposed to be better than this: http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png (in fairness, I had to throw a bunch of icons onto the Google Launcher desktop because it's not my default and I wanted to show how space is used. Also I put neutral-ish wallpapers on so as not to distract but they're not my usual ones.)
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yeah, exactly this. I find the stock iPhone-like launcher pretty useless. I ended up using Apex Launcher, because it lets me have much smaller icons and a denser grid. This is how it looks: http://imgur.com/a/ce72A http://imgur.com/a/ce72A. Those are fresh shots I just did, no editing or setting things up. That's how it looks on my phone every day. There are some display bugs, particularly with the system flashlight widget, but I got used to them and I can't live with anything that has bigger / less dense icons. I also find a simple black background to look cooler than a wallpaper (having a screen that displays black well helps).
jcfrei 11y ago
I don't think people get less productive using smartphones (but I'm not 100% sure that that's really what you are implying). I think the demographic of web users has/and is still shifting. Desktops have always served the more technologically inclined people better and left less technologically "literate" people behind. Thanks to smartphones a whole new demographic of less "technologically literate" people gain access to the "web" (although mostly through native apps). It should be no surprise that we see less web searches, relatively speaking. The only move Google can do to capture this demographic as well is ever deeper integration of the search engine into Android.
mc32 11y ago
I do search on Mobil as one offs. Quick search. When I'm looking to buy or compare I do it on desktop where I can have multiple large windows open which I switch back and forth and do additional searches based on serendipity. On mobile I feel "caged in" psychologically, but that may be influenced by having had the desktop experience as my first and also my primary experience in search.
- informatimago 11y ago
  Definitely. You soon reach the limits of web navigation on mobiles. (Javascript, screen size, forms, etc). What could help, is if there was an easy and smooth way to pursure browsing started on the mobile on the desktop, and vice versa to continue reading a document started on the desktop on the mobile. One very good thing that Youtube does, is to record in the history the point at which we're in a video, so that if you browse to the history on another browser on another computer, it will continue the video from the point you left it. This allows you to switch between desktop and mobile and vice-versa. Cats can be watched on mobile, but if browse to a conference with slides and you want to take notes, you definitely want a bigger screen and a desktop computer. It's similar for the browsing (including the bookmarks, and the tabs). If they were shared smoothly, one switch more easily between the two devices.
  - duskwuff 11y ago
    > What could help, is if there was an easy and smooth way to pursure browsing started on the mobile on the desktop, and vice versa to continue reading a document started on the desktop on the mobile. Apple has that; they call it "Handoff". It works reasonably well. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681
toddmorey 11y ago
I'm not 100% sure it means people are doing less searching in general, though. I still search a lot with my phone, but rarely using Google. Instead I search Yelp for businesses, search Twitter for news, search Facebook for people. I think it's more about a move in behavior to being more app-centric.
- _delirium 11y ago
  A big one for me is also: search Wikipedia for [lots of things]. On desktop I probably default to the web search bar for this kind of search, with the feeling that if a Wikipedia article is relevant, it'll probably be the first or second web search result anyway. So I don't explicitly go to Wikipedia first. But on mobile I default to trying the Wikipedia app first, mostly because the browsing experience is so much faster, and the pages more readable, at least on my older phone.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I think the speed of the experience is core. Browsers on mobile eat up a big part of device's resources, and the time it takes to load it and perform the search is so big that it doesn't make sense to use it for anything else than general web search. If "there's an app for that", one will use an app for that.
    - vectorjohn 11y ago
      Just as a counter data point, if there's an app for that I rarely use it. Because usually I prefer the mobile browser version to the app for many reasons, not least of which is the way to get to the web version is always the same.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    There is a wikipedia app? This is one of those cases where a little nag on their website pointing out they have an app would have been nice. I had no idea. Although, I use exactly your desktop pattern on my phone. Go anywhere there is a search bar (they're all over on Android), and search "wikipedia foobar" and go straight to the first wikipedia hit. Works better than wikipedia's own search usually. And their mobile site is actually pretty nice. I like it at least. I'll check out the app though.

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.
    - roc 11y ago
      For some users, sure. But that'd be about the user, not the platform. And more specifically, that'd probably be mostly about the time and place of use, not even the user. If those same people had a 27" screen during that same slice of time and space, they'd probably be doing the same thing.
Retric 11y ago
'finding/ordering kit' How is that not search?
- roc 11y ago
  When you already know which vendors you're using. If we get our misc bits from newegg, I might search newegg, but I don't need google.
scholia 11y ago
> Since when does search correlate to productivity? When you're a journalist ;-)

n0us 11y ago

I search more on my Android compared to my (former) iPhone but as my Galaxy S4 ages it has becoming increasingly slow to open the search app and slow to open the browser. Sometimes I avoid searching entirely just because the latency is too much work and involves jumping between the search app and chrome/firefox.

soylentcola 11y ago
I'm curious but do you ever just search in the browser (skipping the separate search app)? I only ask because it never really occurs to me to use a second app to search when both Chrome and (my default) Firefox let you type in the URL bar to search directly. Same results, less steps and app switching.
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  I'm the same way. I'm on a galaxy s4 and I probably use the home screen search bar 2-3 times a week, Chrome search 4-5+ times a day. For no discernable reason, I have never gotten into using voice commands for everything.
- n0us 11y ago
  I do search in the browser and this is generally quicker although part of the reason I search more often is the search box widget that I have on every home screen. Lack of support for true widgets is really an unfortunate gap in the iPhone experience for me but I may switch back for the next two years anyway as I'm not really a fanboy in either direction.

jerf 11y ago

There are studies that suggest that teams that take time out of the day to joke and laugh with each other are still more productive than the teams that are heads down all the time. (I'm grateful my natural inclination has proved out to be a good use of time, but now I don't even feel guilty about it, which is nice.) If we were robots or Vulcans, perhaps socialization is a net loss, but for humans in general it is not. If you are trying to optimize your productivity, removing social contact is not necessarily moving in the right direction; the productivity optimum is not "zero social contact". Of course "social networks" may be low-grade or negative socialization. Perhaps the fact it is "low-calorie" social interaction causes people to spend too much time on it when they could do better by other mechanisms. I don't know, really. I'm just pointing out that assuming social == not producing value is an oversimplification, if you're a human being.

bad_user 11y ago
I don't consider social networking to be about social contact, because the physical contact is missing and most of the time we aren't even talking with our "friends" on these social networks. A "like" or a retweet is not a dialog. Phone calls, SMS messages, IRC chats or even emails are way more healthy than whatever happens on social networks because they are bidirectional. And I'm not even speaking about the magic that happens when shaking somebody's hand or when receiving a smile.
- eggie 11y ago
  Yesterday I realized that it has been a long time since an old friend reached out by email to ask how I was doing. I still do, but I also don't use the most popular social media channels. I wonder if the simulation of contact provided by broadcast-style social media is enough to satiate the need to reach out and make direct contact. Perhaps I should delete my page from facebook. Despite the fact it hasn't been touched in four years it might give people the impression that they know how I am. It is easier to find me by actively searching for my name on the web. Then, even if one does this I've heard that facebook will sometimes make a stub page from media they have available to stand in. It feels like a nightmarish trap in which we train machines to supplant ourselves.

pachydermic 11y ago

I think apps have just done a good job keeping you in their little walled garden - they don't want you browsing the web, checking other pages, etc. They want your eyeballs on their screen so they can sell ads. I think it's easy in theory (and probably hard in practice) to solve this problem. Google just needs to reduce the friction of web searches. I think they've gone a long way to achieving this goal on Android 6.0. For the uninitiated, they added that weird hold to search which automatically picks stuff out from the screen to search and often presents results in a way where it's really easy to switch back to what you were originally looking at. Imagine if all you had to do was think about something to initiate a google search. Okay, that would probably get pretty dystopian but it would let you do many more searches even while your screen has been abducted by an app. I think all google needs to do is reduce the frictions to search.

totalrobe 11y ago
On my phone, the google search is top and center on my home screen. Literally all it takes to search is one click and you can start typing or talking. I've got a motorola so I can also just start talking with my keyphrase and it will search...can't really get any easier.

friednslip 11y ago

this is interesting, it does explain why now on tap is such an important feature for Marshmallow. lets you cross check without switching out of the app

legulere 11y ago

There are also some productive things that are doable with mobile devices. For me that is learning flash cards with Anki and data acquisition for openstreetmap (house numbers, etc.). The problems they have is usually the small screen that makes it hard to view much content at once and that text input is really burdensome. Some tasks require these and are thus not suitable for the mobile devices. They however also have advantages to be usable in many situations computers aren't (for using a computer while standing you need a special desk while you can use the mobile devices in almost every position and place) and touch input may be better for some tasks. For stuff that would be possible both for computers and for mobile devices equally good there's the barrier that it's already been developed for computers and that everybody needing it for work already uses a computer, so you would need to put a unbearable mass of work into it to bring it to already is with computers today.

chris_wot 11y ago

Or it could indicate that Charles Arthur's analysis of the data provided by Google is flawed and so using it to speculate on productivity is a bit of a fool's errand :-) (See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419034 for my reasoning)

sangnoir 11y ago
Is this the same Charles Arthur who contributes to The Grauniad[1]? If it is the same person, then I am not surprised by the lack of cogency. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad
- chris_wot 11y ago
  It is. I've actually disagreed with him in the past in some obscure correspondence I sent him (so minor he won't recall it!), but he's not always wrong :-)
charlesarthur 11y ago
I've responded to your comment there. Obviously, the data is open to lots of interpretations. I tried to use models that seem reasonable and reflect what we know about internet behaviour - particularly the Pareto distribution of most activities.

gdulli 11y ago

It's not inherent to mobile, but the form that smartphones have taken. I remember owning a Treo way back and at that time, a phone was something I could easily compose text and be productive on. Ever since my first smartphone with a touch screen keyboard I've thought of the phone as something to read or play games on. Entering text has become enough of a chore that I stopped thinking of a phone as a productivity tool. It's good at keeping me entertained on the subway or being a music player, but that's it.

hammock 11y ago
Do you have an iPhone? I use the OK Google voice search feature all the time on my phone.
- josteink 11y ago
  People outside the US probably don't find any voice-assisted tools productive at all. TLDR: They all suck. Terribly. Assuming your users will fall back to voice-search is not an assumption you should make without having the data to support it.
  - realusername 11y ago
    Yep indeed, French here, it's not even an option currently. Maybe in the future it will improve but for now it only works in theory.
    - codecamper 11y ago
      you can definitely voice search in French on Google. Heck.. voice search in Hungarian works pretty well.
      - chebastian 11y ago
        Swede here, and yes it works in swedish to, not just works its actually usable. Havent tried to write a swedish sms with it but just saying "hitta närmaste butik" will give me the closest groverystores nearby and so on.

ams6110 11y ago

Interesting. I have an android phone, and I never noticed the google search bar. I just looked and yes, there it is. I've never used it.

bhauer 11y ago
Ha! I had an Android phone for years and never used the search bar. And yet, it's the most prominent feature in view whenever you see a "glamour shot" of a new Android device. It's a Google OS, so of course it's got to have a prominent search bar! But I never once used it—I suppose reinforcing the findings of this article. The ugliness (both visually and metaphorically) of a big Google search bar on the home screen of my phone is one reason I dropped Android.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  It's not the only reason but it's one reason I don't use their launcher. Thankfully, it's dead simple to use a different one and doesn't require any weird hacks or jailbreaking. Nova Launcher is the closest thing I've found to an "ideal" Android launcher. Superficially looks the same by default but you can enable or disable the search bar, the persistent Google Now on the leftmost page (seriously, swiping up has always worked just fine for opening Now), and fixing their odd insistence on having so few rows/columns of icons and widgets when screens keep getting larger and higher-resolution. I understand that you no longer use an Android device but hopefully this is helpful to anyone else who happens to read the comments and has similar wants. There are other launchers but I haven't kept up with them in a while since finding one that works best for me. Seriously though, how is this: http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png http://i.imgur.com/kazES2a.png supposed to be better than this: http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png http://i.imgur.com/RIKz2qe.png (in fairness, I had to throw a bunch of icons onto the Google Launcher desktop because it's not my default and I wanted to show how space is used. Also I put neutral-ish wallpapers on so as not to distract but they're not my usual ones.)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yeah, exactly this. I find the stock iPhone-like launcher pretty useless. I ended up using Apex Launcher, because it lets me have much smaller icons and a denser grid. This is how it looks: http://imgur.com/a/ce72A http://imgur.com/a/ce72A. Those are fresh shots I just did, no editing or setting things up. That's how it looks on my phone every day. There are some display bugs, particularly with the system flashlight widget, but I got used to them and I can't live with anything that has bigger / less dense icons. I also find a simple black background to look cooler than a wallpaper (having a screen that displays black well helps).

jcfrei 11y ago

I don't think people get less productive using smartphones (but I'm not 100% sure that that's really what you are implying). I think the demographic of web users has/and is still shifting. Desktops have always served the more technologically inclined people better and left less technologically "literate" people behind. Thanks to smartphones a whole new demographic of less "technologically literate" people gain access to the "web" (although mostly through native apps). It should be no surprise that we see less web searches, relatively speaking. The only move Google can do to capture this demographic as well is ever deeper integration of the search engine into Android.

mc32 11y ago

I do search on Mobil as one offs. Quick search. When I'm looking to buy or compare I do it on desktop where I can have multiple large windows open which I switch back and forth and do additional searches based on serendipity. On mobile I feel "caged in" psychologically, but that may be influenced by having had the desktop experience as my first and also my primary experience in search.

informatimago 11y ago
Definitely. You soon reach the limits of web navigation on mobiles. (Javascript, screen size, forms, etc). What could help, is if there was an easy and smooth way to pursure browsing started on the mobile on the desktop, and vice versa to continue reading a document started on the desktop on the mobile. One very good thing that Youtube does, is to record in the history the point at which we're in a video, so that if you browse to the history on another browser on another computer, it will continue the video from the point you left it. This allows you to switch between desktop and mobile and vice-versa. Cats can be watched on mobile, but if browse to a conference with slides and you want to take notes, you definitely want a bigger screen and a desktop computer. It's similar for the browsing (including the bookmarks, and the tabs). If they were shared smoothly, one switch more easily between the two devices.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  > What could help, is if there was an easy and smooth way to pursure browsing started on the mobile on the desktop, and vice versa to continue reading a document started on the desktop on the mobile. Apple has that; they call it "Handoff". It works reasonably well. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681

toddmorey 11y ago

I'm not 100% sure it means people are doing less searching in general, though. I still search a lot with my phone, but rarely using Google. Instead I search Yelp for businesses, search Twitter for news, search Facebook for people. I think it's more about a move in behavior to being more app-centric.

_delirium 11y ago
A big one for me is also: search Wikipedia for [lots of things]. On desktop I probably default to the web search bar for this kind of search, with the feeling that if a Wikipedia article is relevant, it'll probably be the first or second web search result anyway. So I don't explicitly go to Wikipedia first. But on mobile I default to trying the Wikipedia app first, mostly because the browsing experience is so much faster, and the pages more readable, at least on my older phone.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I think the speed of the experience is core. Browsers on mobile eat up a big part of device's resources, and the time it takes to load it and perform the search is so big that it doesn't make sense to use it for anything else than general web search. If "there's an app for that", one will use an app for that.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    Just as a counter data point, if there's an app for that I rarely use it. Because usually I prefer the mobile browser version to the app for many reasons, not least of which is the way to get to the web version is always the same.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  There is a wikipedia app? This is one of those cases where a little nag on their website pointing out they have an app would have been nice. I had no idea. Although, I use exactly your desktop pattern on my phone. Go anywhere there is a search bar (they're all over on Android), and search "wikipedia foobar" and go straight to the first wikipedia hit. Works better than wikipedia's own search usually. And their mobile site is actually pretty nice. I like it at least. I'll check out the app though.