On the Paradigm Shift of Search on Mobile Devices: Some Remarks on User Habits

This paper addresses a paradigm shift in the way the web is being searched. This shift is occurring due to the increasing percentage of search requests being made from mobile devices, changing the way users search the web. This change is occurring for two reasons: first, users of smart phones are no longer searching the web relying on generic, horizontal search engines as they do on the desktop, and second, smart phones are far more aware of the user's context than desktop machines. Smart phones typically include multiple sensors that can describe the user's current context in a very accurate way, something the standard desktop machine cannot normally do. This shift will mean changes for the information retrieval community, the developers of applications, the developers of online services, usability engineers, and the developers of search engines themselves.