Handling The Challenges Of Online Search On Mobile Phones

On high-end smartphones, the types of searches that people are doing are surprisingly similar to the kinds of searches they do on their desktop – it isn’t just people looking for directions or looking for sports scores, people are doing complicated searches and looking intensely for information.

But while mobile search confers convenience, it poses a unique set of challenges

Speed: How do we optimize for less powerful devices and slow networks (especially in emerging markets like Nigeria) bearing in mind that people are impatient when they’re searching on their phones — they’re on the go, and they need an answer to help them take an action now. Network speeds are beyond Google’s control and are the gating factor for speed to result in many cases. But what is within Google’s control, and what can be done to help users arrive to relevant results as quickly as possible? We know that people tend to repeat searches on their mobile devices, much more than on the desktop, so we automatically pull up your recent search history when you tap the search box. Sometimes it’s faster to say it than to type it. With Voice Search, you don’t have to spend time pecking at your smartphone’s keyboard. We also learn from the input that we get from users, so our voice recognition capabilities are getting better with every search through unsupervised learning, meaning that the technology has a built-in feedback loop that allows it to improve without human intervention.

Relevance: On mobile devices, it is really important to deliver the right results, the very first time. On mobile, search sessions are, on average, shorter than they are on the desktop – people don’t have time to search, refine their query, search again, etc. Mobile users need the answer as quickly as possible. Google has been working on relevancy since the very beginning, and some of the hard work that we put into making sure our desktop results were relevant is really paying off with mobile. On mobile, you can get the most relevant results across many different types of results, with a single query via Universal Search. For example, if you search "how to tie a bow tie," you will get websites with drawn illustrations in your top search results, but you will also get YouTube instructional videos, without having to search separately on YouTube. Sometimes, the most relevant option on mobile doesn’t even exist on desktop.

Ease of use: On mobile devices, we are literally all thumbs. Mobile keyboards are more difficult to navigate, screens are smaller so it is more difficult to give users navigational instructions and tools, and things that are evident on the desktop are confusing on a smartphone. Our design team uses menus and toolbars to give users choices and option, while keeping the overall experience of interacting with mobile search clean, simple and familiar.

Mobile Instant Previews was a feature that launched on the desktop first, but it was immediately apparent that it would be extremely valuable on mobile. However, it wasn’t as simple as just taking the desktop product and putting it on mobile.

What is in store for the future of mobile search? Mobile search is growing at a rapid pace, fueled by the adoption of smartphones, and moving forward, Google and other companies will continue to be challenged to provide experiences that showcase the full power of the desktop technology on a mobile form factor.

By Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade (Communications & Public Affairs Manager, Google).