A large scale study of European mobile search behaviour

Recent evidence suggests that mobile search is becoming an increasingly important way for mobile users to gain access to online information, especially as off-portal content continues to grow rapidly. In this paper we study the characteristics of mobile search by analysing approximately 6 million individual search requests generated by over 260,000 individual mobile searchers over a 7-day period during 2006. We analyse the patterns of queries used by mobile searchers and focus on key characteristics such as the clickthru rates of mobile searches in order to understand, for the first time, just how well mobile search engines are responding to user queries. Moreover, we compare our results to a number of recent mobile studies and highlight some of the key differences between mobile search and traditional Web search behaviours.