Google Betting On Mobile
By Peter Ferenczi | Mon Apr 25, 2011 10:56 am
Google is making mobile search a central part of its strategy, highlighting the growing the role of smartphones in everyday life.
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The Mountain View, Calif.-based company already holds a dominant 97 percent of the mobile search market by some measurements, in part because of initiatives hatched years ago that are now maturing.
Google's voice search is an effective workaround for the hassle of entering text on phones, and its Goggles app allows visual searches to be initiated by taking a picture of, for example, a product, a label or a bar code.
According to the company, mobile searches are growing at the same rate now as conventional Web searches were in the its early days -- they've increased sixfold over the last two years.
"This is the place that we are essentially betting its future on," said Karim Temsamani, Google's head of mobile advertising.
For Google, mobile search means mobile ads, and ads are its bread and butter. The company has rolled out "click-to-call" ads that make it easy for users reach the advertiser while providing an accurate metric of how effective the ad campaign is. Google also fine-tunes results -- and the ads served with them -- based on whether the user is searching from a PC or a phone.
The company is facing off against other mobile ad sellers, including Apple. Google's advantage lies in its mobile search dominance; everyone else has to wait until a user goes to a specific page to serve ads, while Google gets to take first whack right on the results page -- even the iPhone's default search engine is Google.
The Internet giant's mobile search dominance could see a challenge from Microsoft if its Windows Phone platform, bolstered by its partnership with Nokia, manages to take off. Windows Phone will feature Bing search, and Microsoft has been sharpening the mobile version in preparation for the battle.
In fact, the point of Google's freely-distributed Android mobile OS may be to ensure that its search box stays front-and-center on as many smartphones as possible. By owning the platform, Google makes it harder for potential rivals to establish a beachhead on the device -- and giving the OS away has helped it become the top smartphone OS in the U.S.
Not everyone is happy with the strategy, though: two Korean search portals are suing the company, alleging that it prevents phone makers from including their search software on handsets.
At the beginning of this year, the company announced it would hire 6,000 engineers to focus on development for mobile, so we're likely to see more ad-sponsored innovation from Google in the coming months.
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