A recent large scale study of wireless search behavior using Google Mobile Search (PDF) has been released. After reading over the multipage study a few key topics stand out. The number one use of cell phone browsing results in porn and other sex images. This brief blog entry will note a few highlighted marks for the SEO buff in all Netizens.
The most striking feature of the diagonal is that 34% of the users who queried in the Adult query made a subsequent Adult query.
Notes from the Document
- Currently over 57% of the U.S. population owns a cellular phone and is estimated to be roughly 169,467,393 cellular subscribers.
- The amount of subscribers in the U.S. has grown by over 2 million per month; the potential impact of wireless applications is already enormous and is rapidly growing.
- The goal is to meet user demands for data access at any time and at any place.
- The average number of words per query is 2.3 (median = 2, max = 30) with an average number of 15.5 characters per query.
- An astounding 17% of XHTML queries were URLs. In the future, given that 17% of mobile queries are URLs, it may be beneficial to build address-like behavior into the Mobile search box---URL queries could result in going directly to the URL if it is valid instead of presenting the search results listing.
- The most popular type of query that users performed on the XHTML interface were ADULT queries, which are most commonly pornographic queries. Sample queries from this set include; "
porn", "sex", "free porn", and "playboy". Other popular searches included; "free ring-tones", "eBay", "aim", "free wallpapers", "gmail", "Paris Hilton", "move times", "imdb", and "ticketmaster". - The top three categories of desktop search is "
commerce, travel, employment or economy", "people, places and things" and "computer or Internet". - People may feel more comfortable querying adult terms on private devices. We have observes that users often consider their cell phone as very personal and private device.
- Typing the city and state are more popular construct for specifying location.
- The top 1,000 XHTML queries account for approximately 22% of all XHTML queries whereas the top 1,000 desktop queries account for only approximately 6% of all queries.
- The average number of queries per session for XHTML sessions, is 1.6.
We found that currently the diversity of queries in mobile is far less than in desktop. Interestingly, the top query category is different for each medium used (desktop, pda, and mobile)
- We approximate that the user spends 56-63 seconds imputing a query from a 12-keypad.
- The clicks-through rate across all categories was consistently low which suggests users are relying heavily on snippets in wireless search for their information. We estimate that users who clicked on a request spent an average of 29-36 seconds on the search results page before clicking on their first link. That means that 3.2 search results pages were view per query.
- Desktop statistics which report the average number of screens viewed per query to be 1.3
- Most wireless searchers approach queries with a specific topic in mind and their search topics do not often lead to exploration.
- The most striking feature of the diagonal is that 34% of the users who queried in the Adult query made a subsequent Adult query.
- Some of the strongest matches are between "Adult" and "lifestyle & communities", between "Games" & "Internet & Telecom", and "Computers & Technology" and "Internet & Telecom".
- We found that currently the diversity of queries in mobile is far less than in desktop. Interestingly, the top query category is different for each medium used (desktop, pda, and mobile)
- At present, we may simply be observing the types of queries that are favored in the early stages of adoption of new technological mediums.
- If a user is not able to ascertain the information she needs after a single query, the user may be moving on to a different mode of information retrieval. Meaning a limited set of needs is needed whole mobile browsing.
