Google has released the findings of a study that show new mobile search patterns for Apple’s iPhone and smartphones using Google’s Android.
The new search patterns could signal a change in advertising and behavioral targeting for mobile search, according to an article by MediaPost. The results found that iPhone users search in much the same way as computer users.
The study was completed by Maryam Kamvar and Melanie Kellar of Google and Ya Xu from the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. The three created a metric for quantifying the variability of a user’s search intentions throughout time. The variability metric, or entro-percent, is a “normalized entropy metric” that compares the number of search tasks issued by a user with the number of categories those search tasks fall under.
The group used data in the research from anonymous logs that don’t contain personally identifiable information. The sample from approximately 10,000 users of each platform was selected by a random subset of browser cookies that fell into a specific numeric range.
“Our logs analysis is done on an aggregate-level, which means we’re never looking at sequences of searches made by one user,” Kamvar said.
Of all the study’s findings, the most surprising was that many trends indicate that searches on high-end phones are becoming more like computer-based searches. This includes query length, diversity and repeat search behavior.
“These trends on the high-end phones indicate to us that mobile search is starting to really ‘work,’” Kamvar continued. “In other words, mobile search is a viable means for users to find information.”
The study further found that the average number of words per iPhone query was about the same as those in computer queries. An iPhone query consists of an average of 2.93 words and 18.25 characters. Queries from conventional phones consist of an average of 2.44 words and 15.89 characters, an increase from the previous reported average of 2.35 words.
This information should help Google better serve mobile customers. The research not only indicates that there is no one search interface suitable for all mobile phones, but also suggests that high-end phones that integrate with standard computer-based functions that personalize features would be beneficial to the user.
“(The) study shows that properly targeted mobile ads would enormously benefit the advertiser and the mobile user,” Kamvar added. “This is because we find mobile users on the non-high-end devices who query a topic seem to be ‘loyalists’ to a particular topic.”
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