Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile

Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by kanzure on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:51AM (#10419090)

Using a phone for search is like sucking in information through a straw. Even if you do find something, nobody really wants to setup copy-paste infrastructure between their phone and desktop/laptop. Yes, I know about AirDroid. Loading almost any page is going to be painfully slow, render poorly, and then break completely. When I have loaded a page, I use ctrl+f to search for whatever I was looking for, and I use a large screen to render all the content so my eyes can lock on to whatever I am looking for. Going through 10 different results is just painful on a phone, and on a laptop I can do it in less than a minute. Small screen and touch doesn't benefit me enough to switch from desktop search to phone search...

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by roc on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:28AM (#10419333)

Don't all the browsers offer some implementation of 'cloud tabs', cloud bookmarks, and/or 'read later' sorts of features? Who needs copy/paste?

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by kanzure on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:31AM (#10419364)

Yes, but I am often looking at 10 or 20 things at the same time. I don't need to "read later", I need to read all of them now. I'll probably lose like half my trains of thought if I have to wait multiple seconds to switch back to page rendering one of the other umpteen search results...

For tagged bookmarking I use jotmuch: https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch

For more context, I almost always use my phone with this emergency pocket keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/ZAGG-FOLZKFLEXSLV-Zagg-ZAGGkeys-FLEX/d... .. so I somewhat normal, high input rate.

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by roc on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:36AM (#10419404)

Well, yeah, at the scale of "real research" it doesn't really work. But you wouldn't want to do that on a tiny screen even if copy/paste was up to it. You probably wouldn't even want to do it on a laptop screen. That's just a tool/task mismatch.

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by soylentcola on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @11:43AM (#10419869)

I assume the idea is that you're searching on your phone when you're not at your desktop. Obviously if you have a "full" computer in front of you, you're not gonna switch over to your phone to search. It's for all the times when you aren't at your desk or on the couch with a laptop.

Although, I do search on my phone while at my desktop in exactly one scenario: playing games. It's less hassle to do a quick search for where to find item X in some random game than to pause, alt-tab out, fire up a browser, search, try to remember results, close browser, and alt-tab back to the game. Otherwise, yeah, full browser when I'm in front of one, phone for the rest of my life not spent in front of a computer.

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by ParadigmBlender on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:12AM (#10419224)

I always forget thet my phone (iPhone) offers ctrl-f page search functionality. It is one of the options after pressing the share button.

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by osxrand on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:54AM (#10419541)

Actually, if you just type your search phrase in the URL bar and scroll to the bottom of the suggested URLs that pop up the local page search results are there as well.

Under the "Find on this page" heading.

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by reitoei on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:37AM (#10419409)

Seems like the logical place to put it!

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Re:Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches ... by chris_wot on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @10:48AM (#10419496)

In Safari, type in your search into the address bar, then scroll to the bottom of the autosuggestion dropdown - the search is in there.

Completely unintuitive, I love Apple's design team, but it makes me aware that Apple designers are mortal after all :-)

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