mobile search

According to emarketer:

ABI Research forecasts that worldwide mobile search advertising spending will reach $5 billion by 2013, up from a projected $813 million in 2008.

Mobile phone users have a variety of ways to search including on-deck search applications (provided by a carrier), sms text search (for example to google or others), or through off-deck applications like google or msn.

Given the ever increasing relevancy of mobile and portable devices, ranging from cell phones to blackberries to pdas, mobile search is going to be a very important search growth area, but with different constraints.

For example, it is more difficult to type on these devices and lag time can be an issue, so we can probably expect less overall searches vs. a pc user and more direct, shorter search times. This will also have an impact on adverstisers because of mobile devices smaller screens that make including a lot of text or an image more difficult.

Finally, there is an interesting implication of carrier provided search vs. google. As a mobile user, you may be more inclined to use Verizon's search engine to find the address of a store than to load of a new search application such as google. In this fashion, the commodification of search can be accelerated by the emergence of mobile platforms.