A new vision for mobile search_2009

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Touch search

A new vision for mobile searchTaptu White Paper February 2009

“Taptu recognizes the tectonic shift in mobile search since the advent of theiPhone. It has responded with a roadmap to encourage the innovation that content providers and brands agencies will require to deliver an optimized search and advertising experience for touch devices. It's not only about creating new indexes of pages and content specific to touch phones; it's about fundamentally changing the underlying algorithms to improve ranking and relevancy, and ultimately deliver to this new generation of touch device users abalanced mix of answers and entertainment.”

Peggy Ann Salz, Editor, mSearchGroove

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Table of contents

Executive summary..............................................................................................31.

A day in the life of an iPhoner.......................................................................42.

It’s not my dad’s phone.................................................................................83.

The emergence of the Touch Web...............................................................124.

The future of search on touch devices.........................................................16

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Executive summary

Last year in our White Paper “Making Search Social” we highlighted the needfor mobile search to work well in a social context. This need is particularlyapparent in a new group of users - iPhone users - who are accessing the Webfrom their phones. In our user studies we are seeing a new and different pattern of behaviour compared to normal phone users. iPhone users are browsing the Web much, much more frequently than normal phone users – upto 20 times as much. When they go onto the Internet they are heavy consumersof social networking, news and email. They are also using searching more, butnot to anything like its full potential.Over 50% of these new iPhone users are Generation Y – people born between1977 and 2000. This is a generation that is totally at home with technology anduses social networking sites like Facebook very intensively compared to theaverage consumer. Their choice of the iPhone signals a future consumer shift tothis new category of devices – touch phones – that will move us further towardsan always-connected life.A clear trend is emerging for owners of major Web properties (especially in the News, Sport and Weather categories) to make it easier and quicker for touch phone users to access information on their sites. We are witnessing the birth of the Touch Web – the fast-growing subset of Web sites and Web pages that areoptimised for access by touch devices like the iPhone. Touch devices nowaccount for over 40% of all mobile page requests in the US, compared to just5% one year ago (see Section 3).We conclude with three predictions. First, total global mobile search volumewill grow rapidly from 63m searches per day at the end of 2008 to 620m in2012 – almost 10-fold growth in just four years. Second, the volume of searches from touch phones will grow even faster, to overtake the volume of searches from normal phones by the end of this year. By 2012 over 75% of allmobile searches will come from touch phones alone, representing less than 10%of the installed base of phones and just 20% of annual shipments. We describea new vision for search – touch search – which will allow search to reach its full potential on these devices.

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