Mobile search is the subject du jour: how cool is it?
About 1/1000 as cool as regular search, if you measure coolness by search volume.
Here are the numbers I gathered and combined to create this amazing statistic.
Click Z Mobile Stats issued a report that gave a breakdown of mobile activities, from email and search to portals and business news. I don't buy it, because every cell phone and mobile device that I'm aware of defaults to a portal and I doubt most people have reset that, and yet they list portals far below email and search. Unless every user is doing many searches and emails each time they open their phone, that doesn't seem accurate. But it's the only number I could find, so we'll go with it: 5 million mobile searches per month.
Then I got the total number of fixed searches from Nielsen NetRatings. They use a baseline number of 5 billion searches per month for their search engine market share chart which, though it is not doctrine, seems to be pretty accurate as near as I can tell.
Then comes the tricky part where I divide those numbers and end up with the 1/1000 figure. For every 1000 searches performed from a PC or other fixed device, one is performed from a wireless device.
Given that searching from a mobile device is about 100 times harder, and that people are 10 times more likely to be looking to satisfy an immediate need (and let flow the liquid of commerce) (does that sound like a bathroom joke?), mobile and fixed search are already on par with each other. But neither of those figures are true, so we're not there yet.
But we will be!