Chinese consumers embracing mobile search, mInfo says

By Giselle Abramovich

January 31, 2008

China is the world’s largest phone market

Chinese consumers are beginning to embrace the benefits of wireless search services, enforcing the important role of mobile search providers, carriers, handset manufacturers, ad agencies and mobile advertisers.

China is the world’s largest phone market and insights on the market's trends and behavior of wireless search can help companies geared towards the Chinese market better serve searchers, according to mInfo, a Chinese mobile search provider.

There have been many new players to enter the Chinese market, mInfo reports. Delays in 3G license issuance and network deployment and with new carrier data pricing policies have caused barriers for these firms since active WAP users decreased in 2007 from the year before.

Users found a way around that, accessing the information they needed using mobile search.

According to iResearch, the number of mobile search users grew to 61 million by the end of 2007, and is forecasted to reach 117 million by 2008 and to over 200 million by 2010.

The top five search topic categories for 2007 were:

• Dining and entertainment
• Stock and financial
• Ring tones and pictures
• Weather and travel information
• Leisure and recreational content

The company reported that SMS and IM users did more local and informational searches last year, while WAP and applet users did more rich content searches.SMS and IM users were also more geographically diverse than WAP users, who were mostly from the Guangdong province in China. 

MInfo also found that mobile searchers use query phrases and Web searchers used about one or two keywords per query.

“We find that mobile searchers tend to input phrases with qualifiers to improve specificity in an effort to increase relevance and get more precise answers in a shorter amount of time,” the company said in its release.