Google may be a fairly diversified technology company now, but the lion’s share of its revenues still come from its single most valuable property – Search. Google is by far and wide the most used search engine by the proverbial country mile in just about any market it operates in, with around sixty five percent of the market in the US and sixty seven percent globally, which is significantly above its nearest rivals, Yahoo and Bing, both of which are around the ten percent mark. While Google continues to be the dominant web search engine on desktops, the company has also been able to tap the huge emerging potential on mobile devices, with usage of smartphones and tablets far outstripping that of traditional computers of all descriptions in recent times.
Speaking with Re/Code’s Ms. Kara Swisher at the second annual Code Mobile conference being held at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Half Moon Bay, California, Mr. Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of search, informed delegates present at the event that, for the first time, the company is getting more search requests from mobile phones than from traditional PCs. The tipping point according to Mr. Singhal, came during this summer, when, for the first time, the search giant started handling more searches from smartphones than from traditional desktops and notebooks. Google’s Senior VP of search also let it be known that the search giant defines mobile traffic as search requests originating from any device with a screen size of six inches or smaller. Tablets meanwhile, are an entirely different category on their own, meaning, searches from smartphones alone have now surpassed that of PCs and Macs.
It bears mentioning that Google handles around a hundred billion search requests every month, from all devices combined. According to Mr. Singhal’s latest revelations then, more than 50 billion of those searches are apparently originating on smartphones alone as of October 2015. While Google continues to remain the undisputed search leader on any platform, the company is facing challenge from an unexpected quarter, with Facebook’s built-in search functionality apparently seeing more traffic of late than either Yahoo or Microsoft’s Bing on mobile devices, with neither search engine being able to really dent Google’s market share with their standalone offerings.