Category Archives: Google Mobile

Google’s Mobile Search Challenge In China

In China, a lot of people use the Internet for the first time from their mobile device rather than from a PC. According to an article from LeMonde, Google is struggling to figure out how to satisfy these kind of users. Lee Kai-Fu, President of Google China, said in an interview with Reuters (translated from french):

China has a huge potential in terms of mobile Internet, a lot of mobile phone users will become Internet users in the next few years with the development of 3G and other technologies.

These users have different habits than Americans’ ones. Most of Chinese people using the Internet from their mobile phone do not have a computer. This implies to entirely rethink products responding to their needs.

In China, 500 millions people own a mobile phone, and 120 millons have access to the Internet, which makes it the 2nd Inernet market behind the US.

If Google wants to turn these mobile phone users into long term users of their search engine, they need to make the right decisions to deliver a good user experience. That means adapting traditional Web pages so that they render properly on small screens, and also encourage people to visit mobile sites, especially when it comes to developping mobile commerce.

Mobile Search Kinda Sucks – But Does Anyone Care?

Peggy Anne Salz wrote a post at MSearchGroove where she discusses about the findings of a mobile search study made my Informa.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the relevance of Mobile/WAP results returned by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! on UK mobile carriers’s portals.

The study reveals that Mobile and WAP sites were hard to find in these search engines’s results, and that their relevance was often very poor:

  • Google and Yahoo off-portal Fixed Internet results were spot-on in terms of relevance. (After all, Internet search is what they were designed to do and that legacy makes it patently difficult to switch gears and excel in mobile from day one. As one content aggregator put it: “Google and Yahoo: They talk mobile but think Web.”)
  • Off-portal WAP results were a no-show and poor at best. From the findings: “Results were consistently off-topic, often absurdly so.”

It’s true that operators and/or search engines often tend to want to display traditionnal search results first, rather than mobile search ones.

According to Peggy, Informa informed operators about these issues regarding mobile sites results and it seems like they were unaware of that or really don’t care.

The operators claimed to be unaware of the problems; even more shocking is their indifference.A Vodafone spokesman said: “We’re offering the Internet on your mobile, and from the web results you highlight, we are satisfied that users are getting the information they want.” Translated: delivering fixed Internet content via mobile is the priority; WAP isn’t.

Yep, Vodafone have been saying the same thing since since the launch of their new Vodafone live! portal in the UK: they want to allow their users to replicate on their mobile devices what they can do on a computer. Pretty easy to do, right? Nope, even if handsets are getting better, you still cannot have the same Web experience on your small screen than on your PC.

That’s why there’s still a growing need for mobile specific sites, allowing a better user experience. But operators somehow tend to ignore that, and want to force people to view transcoded sites rather than made for mobile ones.

Peggy concludes her post by saying that no one really talks about the core issue: the state of mobile web. Does it even exist? Should there be a desktop Web, and a mobile Web, with sites designed for handset devices? Or does the mobile Web just consist of transcoded websites?

I personnally that we should have both. If I want to check out the New York Times website while on the go, then a transcoded version is fine. However, if I want to book a hotel room from my mobile phone, I would strongly prefer to have a site designed for mobile devices.

It’s true that there is an obvious lack of real standards for the mobile web, so all actors in this industry: operators, the W3C, mobile developers, mobile startups etc must make an effort to create them and educate site owners. Otherwise, I really don’t see how to trully improve the web experience of people using mobile devices.

AdMob vs. Adsense

Russell Beattie recently dropped AdMob to try Adsense Mobile and he’s sharing a few figures with us:

Type Page Impressions Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM Earnings
AdSense for Mobile 13,819 16 0.12% $0.10 $1.33
AdMob 22,283 256 1.15% $0.81 $17.98

Clearly, AdMob paid much more than AdSense. There may not be enough sites in Adsense Mobile’s inventory yet, which would explain the poor CTR et CPM.

Have you been able to try Adsense Mobile as well? If so, please be kind to share your experience with it vs. AdMob or other mobile advertising platforms.

Google Officially Launches Adsense For Mobile

We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here. Google just announced that Adsense will be availalable for Mobile. Mobile sites owners will now have the possibility to display Adsense ads and will be paid per click.

Google Adsense will directly compete with AdMob, which is currently the leader in this arena. Let’s see how long they will remain at the top…

AdSense for Mobile will be available in : US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.

Google Phone “Confirmed” – Will Be The Computer For The Poor

Finally, someone posted something that looks like a reliable confirmation of the coming release of the Google Phone. Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, a technology podcaster, says that one of his inside sources over at Google confirmed that a phone was about to be launched, and gave him more details on its features.

According to Rizzn’s source, Google doesn’t plan to create an IPhone killer, but rather a $100 Laptop killer. By providing a phone with embedded applications, Google hopes to fill the needs of people who don’t own a computer and offer them an Internet access.

He said that the Google (applications) Suite is going to play a huge role in the usability of the GPhone, and the thought process behind it’s functionality is less about beating the iPhone and more about beating the $100 Laptop, which provides a huge clue behind what will be the pricing structure on this.
Mark believes that the GPhone will be sold at a very low price, and that Google will make its money with advertising. I agree. Google is not a hardware company, it’s an advertising company and this phone will be a way for them to make more money in the growing mobile search/advertising field.

Remember that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said last year that they would provide free phones to people if they accept to view advertising.

Fierce Mobile Content also reports that Google is in discussion with Indian mobile operators Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar to launch the device in early September.

By targeting that kind of area, Google hopes to gain more users of their search engine from people who don’t have a desktop computer.

So, with a phone, a mobile search engine with mobile content search, a mobile billing solution, Google will be all set to maximize its mobile search revenues.

Be ready to see some fierce battle between Google and mobile networks in the coming months.

Vodafone To Add Google In More European Portals

Last year, Vodafone signed a deal with Google to insert its services into the carriers portals. The nature of the deal wasn’t very clear until recently.

Some EU portals will progressively add a Google search box right on the top of their homepage. The first one is Vodafone Netherlands, which launched Google search within their Vodafone live! portal on May 21. The search engine allows users to search within Google’s traditional web index (and see transcoded web pages) but also within their mobile search index.

Of course, Google will insert sponsored ads within the results, and I heard that this is how Vodafone will make money.

Some reliable sources told me that Google will soon be added in more Vodafone portals, such as the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

Mobile SEO: Google Has Killed the Mobile Web

Google launched its new mobile search engine a few days ago.I’ve blogged about it on this post and highlighted the main features.While I think the new user Interface is better than the last one, I’m really saddened (and annoyed) by the fact that Google doesn’t allow users to search inside their mobile web index.

Instead, it has chosen to mix mobile web results with the regular web results depending on the users query. Google must think that because they transcode all pages, users will be happy with what will be displayed on their phones.

Google has probably analyzed the search behavior of mobile users, and depending on where they clicked (web or mobile results), they’ve now decided what to show to the user, without the need for them to select what kind of results they wanted to see.

So, that would mean that this new mobile search engine uses some sort of semantic technology…Yeah, right, the desktop engine is not a fully-fledged semantic search engine and Google wants us to believe that this is the case with the new mobile search engine.

So let’s see how good this new version is. Let’s say that I want to use Google on my phone to search for “ringtones”. With the new version of Google, we have these 6 results on the first page (I did this test with a SonyEricsson W600i):

1. http://www.ringophone.com: transcoded web page : Even if the page was taking so much time to load, I tried to make a purchase and on the next page, my phone displayed an error message saying that the “page was too large to load”

2. http://www.mtv.com/mobile/ringtones/: transcoded web page: Flash Site, unable to buy a ringtone (I got the “page too large to load” message)

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringtones: transcoded web page, Wikipedia page

4. http://department.monm.edu/uptildawn/forum/00000b93.htm?ringtones: spam page

5. http://www.ringtonejukebox.com: transcoded web page, again, I’m unable to browse properly and to purchase a ringtone.

6. www.umes.edu/accsupport/ossd/ossdchat/0000008d.htm?ringtones: spam page linking to a page full of ads (not displayed on my phone)

If you click on the next pages, you’ll only get regular web pages and the user experience will be the same.

If users still had the ability to see only mobile pages, their experience would be better (not excellent though). These are the results you would get if you selected “Mobile Web” on the previous version of Google Mobile. You’ll find mobile sites that will display properly on your browser an that have a mobile specific payment solution, for example this site.

So, did Google just go out of its mind?Why did they abandon the mobile web as a source of results? Transcoding pages is not the best solution to ensure a good user experience. There are more and more mobile websites that are user friendly and Google’s just decided to burry them.

I’ve sent a feedback to Google and I hope they will bring back the “mobile web” soon, as I’m sure a lot of people are going to loose a lot of traffic because of that, and users won’t be satisfied either.

[UPDATE]If you are involved in the mobile web and don’t want to lose traffic, please consider leaving a feeback with the comment form on Google Mobile to bring back the mobile web as a separate source of results. Also, please read Dennis’ post on Wap Review  who also complains about this issue.