Last year we heard informal statements from several Google employees that mobile search queries would probably overtake desktop queries sometime this year. Google just confirmed this has now happened. The company says that more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan. The company declined to elaborate further on what the other countries were, how recently this change happened or what the relative volumes of PC and mobile search queries are now. Google groups tablets with desktops. So this is just smartphones and does not include tablets. Overall the company said that in Q4 2014, US mobile queries (tablets + smartphones) were roughly 29 per cent of total search volumes. This is across the entire industry. With this revelation that mobile search has now overtaken desktop search, we get a bit more colour and context for the recent mobile-friendly algorithm update.
