IP Democracy: Google Traffic from iPhones is Huge

It's always dangerous to extrapolate trends from one's own anecdotal experience (what statisticians called a "fallacy of composition") but I could have predicted based on my own personal experience what Google's own data say: traffic from iPhones is dispropotionately huge and is surging. On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surpassed traffic from any other mobile device, even though the iPhone accounts for only 2% of all smartphones globally.

The reason the iPhone has generated so much mobile phone traffic is that its browser makes surfing the Internet a breeze while virtually every other mobile device just stinks when it comes to accessing the Internet. I must use my iPhone to do Google searches at least five times a week and Google Maps is an indispensable tool for more than just navigation.

True Google-via-iPhone story: A few weeks back I was in a local CVS drugstore, when a mini-crowd began to form around a cat that walked into the store. This cat had a collar with a phone number and calls made to that number went into voice mail. Two women in particular weren't going to leave the store until they felt sure the cat was safe. They didn't want to shove the cat out the door into a busy parking lot that abuts a very major thoroughfare, at night, no less.

Someone suggested that if we could just use the store's Internet connection, we could conduct a reverse phone number look-up and find the address for the cat's owner. That was a no-go with CVS personnel, so I whipped out my iPhone, conducted a search on "reverse number look-up," went to 411.com, and got the address, which was a nearby house. We carried the (very agreeable) cat to the house and chatted with a neighbor who confirmed that this indeed was the cat's home.

Because of its superior Internet browsing capability, the iPhone might very well have saved this cat's life. While not quite on the level of the tales told on the iPhone commercials, my most recent experience with using Google via the iPhone certainly underscores Google's own statistics.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 14, 2008 8:53 AM to IP Democracy