Google: Users Are ‘Googling’ More From Mobile Than PC

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Google has announced that as of the second quarter of 2015, more search requests are now being made on mobile devices than on desktop PCs in the U.S. and a number of other countries across the globe. The search titan announced the milestone event at a digital advertising conference on Tuesday, May 5th.

The company also launched announced the launch of a service for comparing mortgage rates in the U.S. on Tuesday. The new service is similar to a service for auto insurance policies that Google rolled out in California a couple of months ago. The firm is planning to add three more states (Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania) to its auto insurance service.

Google keeping up with the mobile revolution

Google has been able to ride the wave of the mobile revolution better than most firms largely because its search engine and other services are embedded into the highly popular Android mobile operating system.

However, Google’s average ad prices have been dropping for nearly four years now, partly because marketers will not pay as much for ads displayed on the small smartphone screens. That said, Google now reports that mobile ad prices are moving up and will likely keep doing so as marketers understand the value of contact with potential customers at the moment that they are looking for someplace to eat or comparing products on a smartphone while in a store.

“The future of mobile is now,” argues Jerry Dischler, a Google vice president in charge of the company’s AdWords service.

More on mobile search requests

Google’s mobile search requests are outstripping PC requests in 10 countries including the U.S. However, Japan is the only other country that Google is specifically identifying.

The firm is also not saying exactly how many mobile search requests it is receiving. The company has said that that it handles over 100 billion global search requests every month, including queries on PCs and mobile devices.

Of note, Google overhauled its search-recommendation system to favor websites that are easier to read and load on smartphones last month. That change, popularly known as “Mobilegeddon,” led to millions of commercial websites making improvements to work better on smartphones so they would not be demoted in Google’s search rankings.

By the same token, the company has also introduced several new advertising formats that function better on mobile devices. For example, rooms can now be directly reserved within hotel ads, and car ads can be viewed in full screen to improve the comparison shopping experience.

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