Mobile search was a popular theme at the Mobile Marketing Association?s Mobile Marketing Forum, with many panelists expressing a firm belief that it is where the money is going to be.

Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms at Google, Mountain View, CA, is very bullish when it comes to mobile search. He said that Google has seen a 500 percent growth in mobile search from 2008 to 2010 and a 67 percent increase in mobile queries in the last quarter alone.

?Everything is leading to search,? said Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB, New York, during his panel on Tuesday at the MMF. ?IAd is just something that is shiny and new.

?Steve Jobs has proven that advertisers will allocate $60 million into mobile advertising but $60 million is nothing when you compare that to other channels,? he said.

Mr. Gunning said he expects mobile search to be the area where there is real money.

By the end of 2010 eMarketer expects that mobile search with comprise 24 percent of the United States mobile advertising spend, compared to 48 percent for messaging and 28 percent for display.

However, by the end of 2013, eMarketer predicts that mobile search will comprise 37 percent of U.S. mobile advertising spend, with display accounting for 35 percent and messaging accounting for 28 percent.

EMarketer?s data supports Mr. Gunning?s suggestion that mobile search will be where the big bucks are.

Here is a chart from eMarketer breaking down U.S. mobile advertising spend by format from 2008-2013.

Steve Jobs seems to think otherwise.

Last week at The Wall Street Journal?s D| All Things Digital conference Mr. Jobs expressed doubt in regards to mobile search.

?[Mobile] search is not where it's at,? Mr. Jobs said. ?People are using apps way more than they are using search.?

Mr. Jobs? statement is understandable since his company is in the application business and not in the search business. It would be bad for businesses to promote mobile search versus applications.

?I agree with him,? said Duane Edwards, senior vice president of product management at Globys, Seattle. ?As I think about the big picture, my observation has been that from periodicals to radio and television to the Internet to the mobile Internet, each of these different channels and form factors for consuming content has had a different primary means for discovering the content and a different means for monetizing the content with advertising.

?With each new channel there is some success in utilizing the techniques successful in the previous channels but the real winners have come with a new approach,? he said. ?For example, with the Internet, the banner ads and videos that were the primary initial advertising focus are essentially replications of the advertising seen in periodicals and television. 

?Sure, those approaches have had some success but Internet advertising wasn?t really nailed and won until Google monetized search, which had no precedent previously.?

Mr. Edwards sees the same thing happening in mobile today.

The various advertising formats  ? banners, video and search ? worked for previous channels. However, he does not think they will ultimately be the winner with this channel. 

Instead, the winner will come from an experience of content discovery and consumption that is distinctly mobile.  That could very well be applications or some unique form of advertising related to them.

Some might disagree.

There is another angle to argue here. In order to maximize success in the mobile Web world, businesses need to make it easy for consumers to find them and the goods, services and deals they provide.

Due to the growth of mobile Internet usage and the surge in GPS-enabled devices, Juniper Research predicts that location-based local search and information services will be used by nearly 1.5 billion mobile users by 2014.

Total revenues from all mobile location-based services are expected to reach $12.7 billion by 2014.
Jupiter predicts that search will comprise a large share of the $12.7 billion.

?With more consumption of content on mobile devices comes the need for discovery,? said Mickey Alam Khan, editor in chief of Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, New York.  ?Hence search will gain a new lease of life on mobile, not just limited to typed queries but voice-activated searches and image recognition.

?Add to that the many new app stores out there and consumers will need much help searching through hundreds of thousands of apps and millions of sites and locations,? he said. ?You just can?t escape Google, Bing and Yahoo.?