Deciphering Trends In Mobile Search

Authors: Maryam Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja

Date of Publication: August 2007

Name of Speaker: Venkatasomeswara Pawan Addanki

Study on how users do mobile search will help to improve user experience and increase in mobile service usage.

Mobile search: Google search engine tailored for mobile devices like PDA, cell phones.

The study of 1 million page-view requests from Google logs during one month period, which were done from mobile devices.

Introduction

Only wireless mobile requests was taken for consideration.

The data was only from one US mobile carrier. Only web queries on mobile was only criteria. Grouped request into sessions, where each

session is series of queries by single user within short range of time.

Session consists of 3 phases Formulating query Browsing the search results. Viewing the search results.

Sample Data for study

Average (cell)mobile query was 2.56 words and 16.8 characters, which is similar to PDA and computer based queries.

Mobile(cell) phone 10 key multitap requires average of 40.9 key presses per query, which is double the effort on normal keyboard.

An estimated 39.8 seconds to type query on cell phone.

PDAs queries average input time decreased to 30.1 seconds.

Statistics

The popular was the adult category.

A study reported conventional web search had decline by 50 % in adult queries from 1997 to 2001.

Adult queries on conventional web searches account only to 10% of all queries in 2001.

Top five categories in mobile search

Wireless search is a more recent boom (in 2005-2007) than desktop search, it would also follow the same trend as Desktop search. Percentage of adult queries will decline as service would attract more users.

Authors speculated that people feel more comfortable querying adult term on private devices.

Hypothesis for high percentage of adult queries

Studying the distribution of queries across a broad set of topics is one method to examine the diversity of search requests received.

Method2: what percentage of the total query volume the top-N unique queries accounts for.

Measure of diversity in search queries

Dataset of 50,000 queries from cell phones and PDA searches collected during one month.

The top mobile query accounted for about 0.8 percent of all wireless queries.

Top 1000 mobile queries accounted for about 17 percent of all cell phone based queries.

PDA queries had more variation and accounted for 13.5 percent of all queries.

Analysis of diversity in search queries

Mobile queries are more static and of same queries are searched.

Reasons:◦ PDA and cell phone browsers doesn’t support full

HTML capabilities as Desktop, which leads to few tailored queries which work on mobiles.

◦ The user base is small for wireless and mobile. The small user base may share same profiles.

Hypothesis on mobile queries

User after entering the query, gets 10 search results on the mobile.

Most users find the relevant search results in first page or chose not to look further.

About 10.4 percent of queries had requested to display more than initial set of search results.

More than 50 percent of search results led to click.

It takes an average user around 30 seconds to scan the search results.

Query results and Statistics

A user might choose or modify the original query.

Average number of queries per session is 2. Query pairs: Two queries are said to be pairs

if they are searched in the same session. Around 66.3 percent of all query pairs in a

session fell in same category. Moreover, Second query was refinement of

first query 56.7 percent of the time.

Query results Continued

The study of 2007 showed some excellent results of how users search on mobile devices. There were some interesting changes from year 2005 study.

Some of the changes being:◦ Users types faster◦ More users are clicking◦ More exploration with a session◦ Less Homogeneous queries◦ More High-end devices

Trends in 2007

User types faster:◦ Time from requesting the google front page to

submitting a query has decreased from 66.3 to 44.8 seconds in 2007.

Trends in 2007 continued

More Users are clicking◦ In 2005, less than 10 percent of queries with

atleast one click on a search result.◦ In 2007, the percent of queries with atleast one

click, was more than 50 percent.◦ Request for more search results increased from

8.5 to 10 percent. Factors for increase:

Drastic improvements in transcoder technology. Secondly, reduction in time to retrieve the search

results.

Trends in 2007 continued

Less static queries:◦ Diversity of queries increased◦ In 2007, top query accounted for 0.8 percent of all

queries, as opposed to 1.2 percent in 2005.◦ Measuring the cumulative frequency of the top

1,000 queries from a random set of more than 50,000 mobile queries in 2005 and 2007, a decrease from 22 to 17 percent.

Trends in 2007 continued

More High end devices

More adult queries:◦ Better transcoder improvements.◦ It may reverse, as it did in wired networks.

In conclusion, It can be said that users spend same amount of words/characters for queries on mobile phone.

Trends in 2007 and Conclusion