It's no secret that we're glued to our mobile devices. But what are we doing on them? Searching Google, for one thing.
The company today confirmed that "more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the U.S. and Japan," according to Google's internal data.
The company did not elaborate or list the other eight countries. The blog post used to make the announcement largely focused on how Google's AdWords clients can capitalize on the ongoing shift to mobile. (Increased mobile searches are a "tremendous opportunity for marketers," according to Google.)
But it comes shortly after the so-called "Mobilegeddon," when Google started giving mobile-friendly sites priority in search results on smartphones or tablets. Websites not currently optimized for variously sized mobile devices are buried under an avalanche of results, while mobile-friendly sites rocket to the top.
"When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant and timely results, no matter if the information lives on mobile-friendly Web pages or apps," Google said in a February blog post announcing plans for the April switch.
By last month, however, mobile marketing firm Somo suggested that well-known sites like Versace, American Apparel, Dyson, David Beckham, Microsoft's Windows Phone site, and a handful of U.K.-based services were not yet ready for the switch.
They probably should have seen this coming, though. In 2011, IDC said that, by 2015, more users would access the Internet via a mobile device than from a wired Ethernet connection. Earlier this year, meanwhile, Cisco predicted a mobile traffic explosion in the coming years.
Still, as Search Engine Land noted, comScore data from March found that only about 29 percent of searches in the U.S. were conducted on a mobile device. "What Google is now saying suggests that either the comScore data were incorrect or the growth of mobile search is happening much faster than anticipated or some combination of those explanations," according to the blog, which got a "no comment" from Google when it asked about the discrepancy.