iPhone Drives Learning About Contextual Search

If engineers, analysts and marketers at Google are smart, and we would agree they are smart, lots of really important data is being gathered about what it is that mobile Web users do on their mobile browsers. The reason is that the preliminary data suggests that iPhone users are much more heavy browser users than users of other makes and models of mobile devices.

That sort of information is going to be really important as software designers at Google and elsewhere try to unravel the secrets of mobile search. So far, everybody seems to think there are contextual factors to mobile search that make it different from desktop PC search. In other words, people probably are going to be asking different questions and trying to do different things when initiating a mobile Web search. Directions have to be right at the top.

My own usage tends to be "what's the address of the place I am going to" and "where can I find the closest book store." Another favorite: "where can I find good Thai food close to where I am?"

Everything beyond that remains to be discovered.