Google has hinted that the value of search advertising on mobile phones is rapidly catching up with traditional Internet search and could soon command higher rates.
Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice-president of engineering for mobile applications, said on a webcast to investors this week that search traffic on phones has “gone up five times in the past two years” due to the rise in Internet-savvy smartphones.
While he did not put a figure on the percentage of search queries from mobile devices, the Wall Street Journal pointed to recent research from Thomas Weisel Partners that suggests it could be greater than 10 percent.
The development of better mobile browsers in smartphones is driving the shift to mobile. The number of searches from devices based on Google’s own Android platform and Apple’s iPhone is 30 to 50 times as great as from non-smartphones.
Smartphones are allowing Google to push further into location-based advertising.
The market for mobile device software should rocket to $17.5 billion within three years, with downloads of mobile applications to handsets from slightly more than $7B in 2009 to nearly $50B in 2012, according to the independent study commissioned by GetJar, which claims to be the world’s second largest app store.
