Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
The iPhone Is Really a Trojan Horse For The Real Business Which Is…
So I woke up today and saw the latest rumor that Apple is working on its own search engine. I must say that I have not historically followed Apple too closely, but holy crap the coverage of that company on the web is insane… I think the number of Steve Jobs disciples must only be surpassed by Obama and Oprah… let’s just hope Jobs doesn’t decide to declare war on some small country, I think congress just might hear him out.
So here goes, this post is purely pandering to that unbridled demand for Apple related rumors and what ifs.
The news this am is thanks to TechCrunch, Is Apple Building A Search Engine? to summarize it goes something like this:
Yes Apple is building its own search engine because:
- they have a bunch of traffic so it would be a good idea
- Steve Jobs is not pleased with Google’s Android becoming competitive with his iPhones
- Google CEO is allegedly forced to cover his ears and go ‘nuh,nuh,nuh,nuh,nuh’ while awkwardly staring at the ceiling at Apple board meetings anytime someone says the word ‘mobile’
No Apple is not building its own search engine because:
- they surely would poached, or at least advertised for some, web search engineers by now if it were true… no poaching or hiring that anyone can tell so far.
So lets just say that Apple is working on its own search engine. Do you think it will be of the regular ol, plain vanilla, html scraping, evolutionarily challenged, web crawler variety? Hell No, if for no other reason than that’s not Steve Jobs style! I say it will be a revolutionary new mobile, location aware, search engine for connecting you with the people, information and stuff directly around you as you travel about in the real world.
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find FaceBook Friend Profile On The Web
Apple Search: Find Friend in Restaurant around the corner
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find eBay auction listing for hard to find toy
Apple Search: Find hard to find toy on shelf at store in next town over
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find official AP news stories about stuff happening 1k miles away
Apple Search: Find local, P2P, news related to the world directly surrounding you, wherever you are
Select factoids designed to support this rumor include:
- Apple is a leader in enabling location awareness in their phones: GPS, Wi Fi positioning, Google Maps, Core Location API functionality.
- Apple not allowing turn by turn navigation applications to be developed for iPhone, even though it’s the known killer LBS app
- Being in hardware business stinks long term, and selling music ain’t much better.
- there are only a few tens of billions of inhabited “places” on Earth and another 6-7 billion people on Earth… versus 1 trillion web pages on the web, so the size of the search job is much more contained and manageable… maybe those web search engineers aren’t really necessary
- It would be kinda cool, and Steve Jobs likes to do cool stuff
The Mobile Search Opportunity, Turning PageRank into PlaceRank
So I see that Google search market share is up to nearly 2/3 of all searches according to the latest stats, and has been trending in that upward slope for quite a while now. So you may be wondering, what happens when they start to run out of room at say 70, 80, 90 or 100% of search share… how do they keep it going?
Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).
In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.
If there is any commonality between those 1 trillion pages of information that Google currently helps us navigate through it’s that they all 1. sit on a publicly available webserver usually on a server farm somewhere 2. are not time or place dependent and 3. the popularity rank or pagerank is determined in large part through votes (links) placed by a global democracy of users.
Where I am, and information on the places, items and people around me. Take for example these things that we don’t even consider doing a Google search for
Search is 90% solved! Woo hoo, now we can go out and play!
I am sure it was just one of those goofy comments that she made, that she now wishes she hadn’t made that she is now trying to clarify, which she does a respectable job of via the Official Google Blog. I am equally as sure that back in the 1876 Melvil Dewey said something equally as silly when he came up with the Dewey Decimal System… I am sure it went something like this: “ all knowledge can be categorized into ten core classes and I have devised a perfect hierarchical classification system that can handle an infinite number of new elements. The problem of searching for and finding information is practically solved.” Followed by the off the record comment “woo hoo yeah baby! Now we can go paaaaart-ay!
What Melvil didn’t acknowledge is that not all the worlds’ information would be written into books and stored in large libraries.
What Google is not acknowledging is that not all the worlds’ information is written out and coded and available to be stored in large server farms.
The Google clarification goes on to recognize some key gaps including cross language information sharing, modes of search (like by voice) and personalization… all things that focus on the different methods of getting at and sorting through stuff currently available on web servers. The clarification does not address the problem that the worlds’ information is no more confined to the world of indexable web servers than it was confined to books back in 1876.
Ok getting back to location stuff as an example, a couple of simple things I might like to know in the next few hours are: Where is my bus? Or where is my friend? Or where can I find a great Cuban sandwich within a five minute walk for under $8. Or are there any guys playing basketball at the gym right now? Google search can’t answer any of these questions. Sure, it may be able to get me to a bus schedule of where a bus SHOULD be, or that a Cuban restaurant or a gym exists nearby. But that is quite different than information on the actual location of the bus, or that a deli nearby does great Cuban sandwich, or that the gym even has a basketball court, let alone whether there are people there playing at that moment.
The Google’s of the world still have a lot of work to do to first figure out how to handle all the knowable yet transient (there one moment, but then gone the next) information that exists out there already… and then they can move on to the bigger problem of helping to get information materialized in a way to make it more accessible… scanning books was a start, but I certainly hope it wasn’t then end.
