interesting thought. Not sure I agree with every aspect, but generally you describe some interesting trends, in particular the importance of the toolbar-traffic.

I fail to see how the Instant UI would work on mobile. Half of the screen of the browser is taken by the keyboard. Besides the input field, that leaves you five lines of text. Good enough for suggest-list, not enough to display anything more -like the dynamic set of results instant delivers to the desktop.

Now Google already includes Suggest in their mobile search page. Latency over mobile networks handicaps the user experience to the point of “nice idea but to slow for me”.

Now mobile latency – in my understanding – is inherent to mobile networks and beyond Google’s influence. So, Instant – as an enhanced version of Suggest – will work over Wifi, not really over 3G.
Probably LTE will change things, but that will take years to reach a broad base of subscribers.

Great article. The key to driving up revenue is performance and personalization that comes from device, user and location context. We recognized this several years ago and now have a version of Google’s Android browser which adds these missing features and more. For instance one thing that is critical to monetizing the web is accurately determining HTTP web traffic performance in the Mobile browser. Our version of the Android browser now includes that capability. And in tests you can clearly see one of Google’s own servers not performing up to snuff. Let me know if you would like the link to see the screenshots.

Keep up the great posts.

Cheers,

Peter Cranstone
5o9 Inc.

This article quotes Google as saying that more than 50% of searches come from the home page