iPhone users search Google 5,000% more than the nearest competitor

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed internet searches “within the next several years”, Mr Gundotra said.

More searches mean increased revenues for Google, which makes its money from advertising attached to search results. Google has never separated out its mobile revenues but Mr Gundotra said the business was growing “above expectations”, both in terms of usage and revenues.

This echos many other studies that have shown that people are much more likely to to browse the web on the iPhone. The reasons are pretty simple:

• The plan that comes with the iPhone allows for unlimited browsing
• The EDGE access that comes with the iPhone is fast enough to allow for browsing on the go. It is slow enough, however, that mobile carriers can charge reasonable rates for unlimited access.
• The great iPhone OS transfers seamlessly between Wifi and EDGE to give a great browsing experience
• The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod is by far the best web experience you can have on a portable device
• People who buy the premium iPhone buy it because they expect to spend a lot of time on the web.

The numbers though, are still astounding. More and more people are realizing that the iPhone is a computer, not just a phone - or at least people are browsing with it like a computer.

Via Macworld UK