Google sees a buoyant mobile market

Further confirmation that the mobile market holds promise for all manner of enterprises was given this week when IDG News reported on comments made by Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google’s mobile group.

Gundotra and two of his colleagues shared some general data about mobile traffic to Google services, revealing that in the past two years, Google has seen mobile-search traffic grow by a factor of five.

“Those searches are not taking the place of computer-based search,” he said. “When we see desktop usage decline, like when people go out to lunch, that’s when we see mobile spike. We think these are brand-new searches that we would never have seen previously.”

The executive told IDG that in addition to search, Google plans to optimise all of its services for mobile users and has had some notable success doing so already. For instance, there are now 50 million active users of Google Maps for Mobile.

Currently, 25 percent of Android and iPhone users who download applications spend up to two hours a day using those applications, Gundotra said, revealing that the company is testing an application advertisement system with hand-picked applications.

Google is also trying to acquire AdMob, a company that places advertisements in applications, but the deal is being scrutinised by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Google expects that the number of search queries originating from mobile phones will make up a bigger portion of total queries, although he wouldn’t reveal the current proportion of phone versus computer queries. Because the growth of phone-based queries is moving at a much faster clip than the growth of computer-based queries, “it’s only natural to assume it will represent a bigger and bigger portion of our business,” he said.