back to article PEAK PC: 'Most' Google web searches 'come from mobiles' in US

The majority of Google web searches in America, and a few other nations, now come from phones and tablets – outpacing PCs for the first time, we're told. According to NetMarketShare, Google owned a 92.22 per cent chunk of the global search engine market for mobiles and slabs, and 65.73 per cent of the desktop search market, in …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      "opportunity for marketers to use a new medium to communicate their ideas and products"

      They should try it sometime.

    2. P. Lee

      >>But they do realise that the majority of people making these search requests on mobiles, are basically the same people who previously browsed the web on their computers, don't they?

      I hope they also realise that people are using google not to find new stuff, but as a bookmark service.

      Search again, look for the purple link, click.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good news for me!

    This means marketers will leave me alone on my PC now.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: Good news for me!

        We can live in hope.

  3. jnffarrell1

    Commissions are for closers

    This can only help Google profits. Sales will be scored when and where they belong...at closing.

    Name the last time you closed a greater than thousand dollar a deal without checking your smart phone. Search on your phone rules out baffle them with Bear Scat. Real Estate and Auto Dealers are watching a lot of walk out the door activity if their web ad does not square with what the smart phone using the Knowledge Graph says most closely approaches the truth.

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Commissions are for closers

      Name the last time you closed a greater than thousand dollar a deal without checking your smart phone.

      Never. I do my research before I go to the car lot. Same when we bought our house. We did our research ahead of time and very in depth. When I walk into the shark tank, I go fully armed (informed) and not scrambling at the last minute with a smartphone. I keep assorted hard copy print outs in the car just in case and I know what I expect to pay. They jack me around, I'm off to see someone else.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Commissions are for closers

        @Mark 85 exactly, I wouldn't walk into such a situation unprepared and rely on my smartphone.

    2. sabroni Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: Brain dump.

      Any chance you could arrange those words to make sense? "Search on your phone rules out baffle them with Bear Scat"????

    3. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: jnffarrell1 Re: Commissions are for closers

      ".....Name the last time you closed a greater than thousand dollar a deal without checking your smart phone...." When I bought my last house, my last car, our last family holiday, my last TV, trans-Atlantic flights, all in the last year. Oh, you mean business stuff? Well that would be all the deals then as I accompanied every negotiation with oodles of documentation, and seeing as mobes are consumption rather than production devices it made them completely irrelevant to the process for anything other than related verbal communication (which would be the "phone" bit, nothing to do with the "smart" bit).

      1. Kye Macdonald

        Re: jnffarrell1 Commissions are for closers

        Every working day of every working year for the last 10 years.

        When it comes to real business deals you sure as hell aren't going to dump a decision at the 11th hour based on a crappy google search.

        I am much more likely to use my phone for cheap consumable items where I am impulse interested in them. ie I'm in JB HiFi and I fancy those $99 pair of earphones. Oh they are $19 from xyz site. Thanks anyway.

  4. g00se

    Might that be because users of 'modern' devices either can't or don't know how to use the address bar?

    1. P. Lee

      re: Might that be because users of 'modern' devices either can't or don't know how to use the address bar?

      and modern device's address bars don't do the right thing.

      If I type in text without spaces but with forward slashes, ITS A URL! try http, then https with it.

      If I enter a single word, check with DNS to see if it resolves in my local domain, BEFORE going off to a search engine. Do not make me type http:// first, requiring several keyboard shifts to get to the colon and forward slashes. That just makes me hate your device. If you want to do that, at least give me "http://" and "https://" keys on the main keyboard, or prefill them.

      Years ago, I made the mistake of calling our new imac, "imac". Apple must be so disappointed that I search and search and never click on "buy." :)

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        "If I type in text without spaces but with forward slashes, ITS A URL! try http, then https with it."

        The other way round, I hope. And TBH if you can be forced to fallback to http, then it's a vuln.

  5. Eddy Ito
    Meh

    Says nothing

    Here's another example, my coffee cup is 95% full but my teapot is only 68% full. That doesn't mean most of the liquid is in the coffee cup because like this netmuckshare stat it makes no mention of the overall size of either.

  6. razorfishsl

    This has more to do with the invasive systems in the mobiles than with human based searches.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How long before the FTC starts sniffing around?

    65% of desktop market and 92% of mobile market - with the mobile search market now larger than desktop? That's 80% overall and climbing fast - similar to Microsoft when the FTC first started looking at them. It would sure be a lot easier to break up Google Search from "everything else" Google does than it would have been to split off Windows from everything else.

    Certainly their conduct in the way their search monopoly always prioritizes their own properties (maybe not #1 rank every time but first page every time) is much like the way Microsoft leveraged their Windows monopoly to help Office / Server sales to the tune of many billions each (and tried to help Windows Mobile, MSN and other products that were so terrible even a monopoly couldn't help them)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Similar results

    From the sites I manage, 2 years ago it was 70% desktop and 30% mobile. Now it's pretty much 50/50.

    Introducing fully responsive design certainly helps too.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: Similar results

      There's an unpleasant side effect: sites are starting to appear which are definitely leaning to a small portrait screen, rather than a large landscape screen. Large letters, loads of white space, minimal text.

      Thanks. Just what I wanted.

      1. GerryMC

        Re: Similar results

        ...and almost unusable on a PC. Check out aa.co.nz

  9. big_D Silver badge

    Big display

    I'll do a mobile search if I need information immediately when I'm out and about, but generally I'll wait until I can get to a decent display and a proper keyboard, before I do a search.

    I find search on mobile devices to be too frustrating.

    1. MacroRodent

      Re: Big display

      I find search on mobile devices to be too frustrating.

      I find the search is generally OK, but often the sites the found links refer to are poorly visible on mobile. But this is improving. The fact that the the mobile is always there when I need the answer is a killer advantage.

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Big display

        Give me a real keyboard with Cherry Blue MX keys over a poxy smartphone keyboard any day of the week.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    a tremendous opportunity for marketers

    likewise developers to produce effective, simple filtering tools for the masses (no rooting).

    1. fandom

      Re: a tremendous opportunity for marketers

      Actually, it is kind if surprising that nobody has come here to boast about using AdBlock.

      Seriously, those are even more annoying that iFans.

  11. Gravis Ultrasound
  12. Sureo

    I'm fairly new to mobile devices but my impression so far is that mobile versions of browsers suck. Everything goes into a search engine first. That doesn't seem to be by accident either. So, its back to the desktop and DuckDuckGo.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Indeed they do

      Mobile in general sucks as compared with the desktop. Tabs are a bit better, and laptops almost but mostly not quite there.

      Having said that, I long ago learned how to change the default search engine for my primary mobile browser (Firefox) to DuckDuckGo. Even so, for me mobile will always be a second-class citizen. My main use for it is getting around (Google Maps + Navigation) and... making cellular voice calls (not VOIP, given the cost of bandwidth for most mere mortals like me).

      Come back to me when desktop levels of CPU and RAM, as well as 20" or better holographic displays for mobiles become a reality.

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: AC Re: Indeed they do

        "....Having said that, I long ago learned how to change the default search engine for my primary mobile browser (Firefox) to DuckDuckGo...." I always have a giggle when installing Linux and setting the Chrome browser's search and homepage to Bing! I imagine the Google Stats boyos gnashing their teeth as the lusers default to using the presented Bing Search rather than going to Google.

  13. Dave 62

    Lies, damned lies and statistics!

    Conveniently glossing over that each mobile search is one of several attempts to search for the same thing while using a touch screen keyboard, the number is further inflated by frustrated page reloads because it's got stuck 99% of the way but isn't actually displaying anything, probably because the google analytics/ads hive has fallen over and like most websites these days it relies on that and won't finish loading the fX>!ing content if it can't load the ads.

    On top of all that, I generally use mobile, if I'm using it for shopping rather than checking opening times or finding a phone number, for checking prices of things I'm looking at in a physical store, not for actually buying things and if I later go on to buy it through my computer only to be greeted by some ugly upscaled mobile site, I'm probably going elsewhere.

  14. iranu

    Google search using kitchen fridges up 840%

    New research indicates that internet enable household fridges are being used to access google at ever increasing rates. A spokesperson said, "we fully expect searches using google from kitchen appliances to overtake personal computers within the next decade".

    Internet enabled toilets, sofas, cookers, fridges, hoovers, lawn-mowers and chainsaws will enable people to search google in an ever increasing number of ways.

  15. jonfr

    Peak mobile

    Now there is peak mobile (device) at the moment. When it is going to end I don't know. What I do know that once it ends there is going to be a lot of free spectrum around.

    As for PC. I don't think they are going away. What might happen (and in short of has) are people living without computers and internet at all. I don't have any numbers that are new, but for Europe (EU) in 2012 that was at 73%.

    Source: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/sites/digital-agenda/files/scoreboard_digital_skills.pdf

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