Category Archives: Mobile Search

Opera Mini Report: WAP is Dead Again, Social Networks Dominate Traffic

Opera published some very interesting data yesterday regarding Opera Mini users’ habits. They looked at aggregate and anonymous traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Key findings of the report are that:

– Opera Mini users go mainly to social networking sites, it accounts for almost 41% of traffic. Those sites are either desktop websites that people want to access from their phones (ie. Facebook), or sites specifically designed for use on a mobile phone. (ie. MocoSpace).

– More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March to browse 2.4 billion pages. Thus far, more than 44 million cumulative users have tried Opera Mini.

– “One Web will triumph over WAP content:” translate: “WAP is dead”: Opera reports that “full” web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic, and traffic to WAP sites has declined. Well, that’s no surprise, Opera Mini users are aware that they can browse desktop websites from their phone so they prefer to do so, but remember that there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, and a large part of them access more to mobile sites than full websites, since they mostly use the native WAP browser pre-installed on their phone.

So unless every mobile user downloads Opera Mini or buy a high end phone, WAP (WML) and mobile sites will still be used in majority.

– Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Also included in the report is a snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini ranked by usage, you can see that most of the top countries are not the richest ones, which again proves that developing countries represent a major opportunity in terms of mobile services.

Snapshot: China

  • Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.
  • E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Top 10 sites in China

China
  1. www.sina.com
  2. www.baidu.com
  3. www.google.cn
  4. www.ko.cn
  5. news.sohu.com
  6. www.xiaonei.com
  7. www.3g.cn
  8. www.paojiao.com
  9. www.188bet.com
  10. www.feiku.com

Snapshot: United States

  • More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

United States
  1. www.myspace.com
  2. www.google.com
  3. www.mocospace.com
  4. www.yahoo.com
  5. www.facebook.com
  6. www.live.com
  7. www.hi5.com
  8. www.wikipedia.org
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.ebay.com

Snapshot: United Kingdom

  • The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

Top 10 sites in the U.K.

United Kingdom
  1. www.facebook.com
  2. www.google.co.uk
  3. www.live.com
  4. www.bebo.com
  5. www.mocospace.com
  6. news.bbc.co.uk
  7. uk.yahoo.com
  8. www.itsmy.com
  9. www.faceparty.com
  10. www.ebay.co.uk

Opera Mini Chooses Google as its Default Search Engine (Again…)

Opera Mini announced today that Google will now be its default mobile search engine. A Google search box will be present on top of Opera Mini Start Page. This deal will definitely help Google increase its mobile search market share. Opera said that most of its traffic is generated from the search function on its browser:

Every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages, with much of that traffic generated through the search function in the browser.

It’s funny to note that Google used to be Opera Mini’s default search engine, but was replaced by Yahoo! in January 2007.

Nokia to add Google Mobile on its handsets

Nokia has its own mobile search application, embedded in some of its cell phone models. The application currently provides shortcuts to Yahoo! OneSearch, Microsoft Live Search Mobile, Baidu and Yandex.

Today, Nokia announced that it will add Google to the list of search engines that consumers can access from its phones.

Nokia explained that it prefers to gives choices to their customers, rather than just providing one search engine.

“Providing choices for our consumers is an important driver in Nokia’s Internet service strategy,” Ilkka Raiskinen, Nokia’s vice-president of software and services, said in a statement issued at the Mobile World Congress wireless fair in Barcelona.

TeliaSonera Ditches Microsoft, Chooses JumpTap as their New Mobile Search Provider

Up until now, TeliaSonera, the largest mobile network operator in Finland and Sweden, was using MotionBridge (acquired my Microsoft in 2006) for their on-portal search service. I’ve heard from an inside source that in the 2 weeks, TeliaSonera will relaunch a brand new search service on their WAP portal in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. TeliaSonera will stop working with Microsoft. Instead they have chosen JumpTap, a white label mobile search engine that has been growing during the last 2 years.

TeliaSonera’s mobile content providers will still be able to index their content with JumpTap, so that users can find them via search keywords, just like MotionBridge/Microsoft. What’s new is the paid search solution offer. Advertisers can now buy sponsored listings from JumpTap to appear in the search results, there will be two ads per page.

TeliaSonera’s WAP portal is also going to be revamped, and the focus will on mobile Internet thanks to a tool called SurfOpen, you can find more information about that on this press release.

This is yet another case where a mobile network company chooses to work with a white label search engine, rather than one of the big 3s. Let’s wait a few months or years to see if this choice proves to be the right one for users, advertisers, and mobile phone companies.

Yahoo and AT&T Sign Mobile Advertising Deal

Yahoo! announced today that it is partnering with AT&T to provide mobile ads to AT&T’s 70 million mobile customers. According to Reuters:

A Yahoo executive said in a phone interview the new deal brings its services to up to 70 million AT&T mobile customers. Yahoo will provide Web search on the customer portal for AT&T Mobility customers and deliver ads to AT&T customers who use the Internet on their mobile phones, he said.

“We are actually gaining more subscribers; we are going to gain more search traffic,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Life division, who oversees the Internet media company’s broadband and mobile phone business.

AT&T’s Mobile Internet portal, MEdiaNet, is currently using Infospace/Motricity for on-portal search, and JumpTap for off-portal search. But it’s not clear if Yahoo! will replace them or just come on top of these existing search services.

Yahoo! proves again that they want to grab the biggest share of the mobile search advertising industry, and they are counting on strong partnerships such as the one with US’ biggest cell phone company to achieve their goal.

Google Mobile Search Update : Mobile Web Index Rescucitated

In march 2007, Google launched a new version of its mobile search engine, which quite looked like Yahoo OneSearch. The new version consisted of a page with just one search box, after entering a query, Google would automatically categorize search results in Web results, Local results, Images and News.

The only problem with this new version was that Google didn’t make a difference between full web pages and mobile pages. Pages from the Web and Mobile Web indices were mixed together, users couldn’t choose what kind of pages they wanted to have. For example, before that, if you couldn’t find pages that would display properly in the full Web index, you could use the Mobile Web index and find only pages adapted to your mobile.

At the time, I explained all the issues of the new Google Mobile in that post. Several people involved in mobile Web complained about the change. I even sent several emails to some people at Google in order to ask them to bring the Mobile Web index back. Well, it looks like Google heard us. The Mobile Web Index is back on Google Mobile Search engine.
If  you go to Google Mobile and search for something, you’ll now have 5 kinds of results: Web, Images, Local, Business, News, and Mobile Web.

I’m glad Google decided to rescucitate the Mobile Web, because even if transcoded pages are great when browsing with a handheld device, they cannot replace sites created specifically for the small screen.