Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that mobile search is becoming an in-creasingly important way for mobile users to gain access to on-line information, especially as off-portal content continues to grow rapidly. In this paper we study the characteristics of mobile search by analysing approximately 6 million individual search requests generated by over 260,000 individual mobile searchers over a 7-day period during 2006. We analyse the patterns of queries used by mobile searchers and focus on key characteristics such as the click-thru rates of mobile searches in order to understand, for the first time, just how well mobile search engines are responding to user queries. Moreover, we compare our results to a number of recent mobile studies and highlight some of the key differences between mobile search and traditional Web search behaviours.