One of the great things about running a mobile search engine (find.mobi ) is that it gives you a direct line of sight into the behaviour of normal users, and their expectations of what is available on the mobile web.
One interesting insight we've gained from find.mobi is that the majority of search phrases are navigational in nature. By this I mean that users appear to be trying to find a particular site rather than a particular piece of information. This took us a little by surprise — we thought that people would use search phrases more bound to the mobile context e.g. "pizza dublin", "taxi", "movie times" etc. But no, on the mobile web right now people are mostly looking for mobile versions of existing web brands that they are familiar with.
Apart from porn and gambling, that is — it almost goes without saying that the various human weaknesses figure large in the the most popular search terms on the web, and mobile is no different in this respect, probably more so. The adult industry in particular is notoriously agile when it comes to adopting new media. Couple this with the fact that the mobile phone is a personal device that is rarely shared and you have a perfect medium for this.
Another interesting behaviour we've seen is that a large number of people type entire URLs or large fragments of them into the search boxes rather than just the brand name. Typical popular examples include "www.ryanair.com" and "myspace.com". (Note to Ryanair: wake up! People are looking for a mobile version of your site!) Why is this? – on the surface this behaviour seems crazy. Why take such pains when you are using a limited input mechanism? Think about it a little more and it makes sense: for many mobile web users the input area in the mobile search form is the first time that they've seen somewhere where they can actually enter a URL, just like they're accustomed to doing on their desktop browsers. Some mobile operators actually went out of their way to make the "Enter URL" option hard to get to on phones. It is disappointing that even on more recent phones this menu option is typically two clicks away (is it any wonder that iPhone web traffic is something like 50x that of other mobile devices?).
Hopefully as time marches onwards and people become more familiar with the mobile web we'll see people becoming more comfortable with the new medium, and harnessing its unique features. There is ample precedent for this — think back to the early days of the web: many of the first web sites were existing brands from the physical world: newspapers, radio stations etc. The first uses of a new medium tend to imitate uses for previous media. Then innovation starts and Darwinian evolution ensures that the new medium is populated with things could not have been done before. On the web this trend is well entrenched now. We've moved from websites that were near-facsimiles of print and other physical entities (newspaper sites etc.) to sites like Facebook, Digg and Twitter that could not be done without the unique features of the web.
We haven't reached this stage with the mobile web yet — the primordial soup of the mobile web still carries too much fixed-web DNA, but things are beginning to change — the first mutations are afoot. It's tricky to predict what this means for mobile search in particular but harnessing the inherently social nature of mobile (the world's biggest social network?) might mean that mobile search uses cases become something like "who of my friends are close?" or using a map as the primary interface to a search engine. Evolution will decide, time will tell.
