Mobile Alters Landscape Where Google Operates

When federal antitrust regulators probed the search-engine business three years ago, they found that Google’s domination of the field was even greater than they had thought. Since then, however, the mobile revolution has drastically altered the search landscape in ways both good and bad for Google.

Smartphone users spend the vast majority of their time -- 88%, according to Yahoo’s Flurry Analytics -- inside apps rather than Web browsing. That hurts Google because its search engine was designed to follow links between Web pages. Smartphone apps typically don’t have links; they are more like islands of content. ComScore estimates US smartphone users spend a fifth of their time inside Facebook’s app alone. Other apps help smartphone users bypass Google for lucrative searches, using Amazon to search for products or Priceline to book a hotel room, for example. Google is a big player in mobile through its Android mobile-operating system, which ran about 80% of the smartphones shipped in 2014, estimates Strategy Analytics. Its apps -- including Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail -- are among the most popular for smartphones. When smartphone users do open a Web browser, Google is even more dominant than on personal computers, with an 84% share of US searches in February, according to StatCounter. ComScore doesn’t release its mobile estimates.