I'm not 100% sure it means people are doing less searching in general, though. I still search a lot with my phone, but rarely using Google. Instead I search Yelp for businesses, search Twitter for news, search Facebook for people. I think it's more about a move in behavior to being more app-centric.
back
1 comments
A big one for me is also: search Wikipedia for [lots of things]. On desktop I probably default to the web search bar for this kind of search, with the feeling that if a Wikipedia article is relevant, it'll probably be the first or second web search result anyway. So I don't explicitly go to Wikipedia first. But on mobile I default to trying the Wikipedia app first, mostly because the browsing experience is so much faster, and the pages more readable, at least on my older phone.
I think the speed of the experience is core. Browsers on mobile eat up a big part of device's resources, and the time it takes to load it and perform the search is so big that it doesn't make sense to use it for anything else than general web search. If "there's an app for that", one will use an app for that.
Just as a counter data point, if there's an app for that I rarely use it. Because usually I prefer the mobile browser version to the app for many reasons, not least of which is the way to get to the web version is always the same.
There is a wikipedia app? This is one of those cases where a little nag on their website pointing out they have an app would have been nice. I had no idea.
Although, I use exactly your desktop pattern on my phone. Go anywhere there is a search bar (they're all over on Android), and search "wikipedia foobar" and go straight to the first wikipedia hit. Works better than wikipedia's own search usually.
And their mobile site is actually pretty nice. I like it at least. I'll check out the app though.
The mobile site is pretty nice too, and pretty similar to the app. If you have a recent phone and are usually on fast data connections the app isn't as compelling, though I still like it a bit more.
One interface feature I like with the app is within-article navigation: if you swipe inwards from the right edge, you pull out a table of contents, and can easily jump to article sections by tapping one. This is useful enough that I find myself unintentionally trying to do it in mobile Firefox, hoping I can jump around a blog post or documentation's headings that way (I wonder if mobile FF could implement this? do enough pages use HTML headings in a semantically meaningful way?).
This is more a stylesheet choice, but the app also more aggressively collapses things other than the main article text, like infoboxes and tables. On the mobile web view I find I have to scroll down too much to get past big infoboxes and such.
On slower phones and slower data connections it's also speedier. Especially on longer pages and pages with more non-text stuff, my phone has a noticeable pause to render the page after it loads, while in the app it's nearly instant. The data transfer via the app is also low enough that it's usable even on slow connections (I'm semi-frequently on T-mobile's free global roaming, which is rate-limited to 2g speeds, ~128 kbps). Since the interface is already preloaded, all it needs to do to load an article is grab the article text through the MediaWiki API, which is usually in the range of 2-20kb. It then lazy-loads images later (which you can disable if you really want to be lean on data).