Sophie Harding, Trends and Insights Director at Mindshare UK, looks at the role of mobile in the search landscape of the future.

‘Search’ is a term that has become a part of our everyday lives. In many ways, it is now an unconscious human behaviour. It wasn’t always like this though; in the last two decades, the search landscape has been transformed. From desktop to mobile, text to voice and visual, and reactive to proactive, search has undergone a significant evolution and will continue to do so at pace. Advertising strategies must evolve accordingly.

To really get to the heart of this changing landscape, we tracked people’s search behaviour using ethnography, face-to-face workshops and neuroscience experiments surveying 1,800 UK smartphone users, pulling our insights together in a report called ‘The Future of Search’. The findings revealed that the search landscape is becoming more varied and fragmented, with people searching deeper, wider and via more devices than ever before.

Many significant changes in the search environment have been driven by the smartphone, with mobile devices enabling us to obtain information instantly and tech innovation happening at pace. Indeed, the number of mobile searches overtook desktop searches three years ago and now it’s estimated that over two thirds of people carry out searches using their smartphones.

It’s not just about typing our queries into search bars either – we have now started to rely on voice and visual aids to facilitate searches on mobile devices. This trend is only set to grow, as speech and image recognition become more accurate over time and new technologies are integrated into our mobile devices.

Voice search
For voice technology, we have reached a turning point, evidenced by the rapid growth in smart speaker penetration. Voice is beginning to be viewed as a useful time-saving medium, and not just the short-term gimmick it was a few years ago. Moreover, even though we will continue to see the proliferation of smart speakers and the integration of voice into myriad devices, mobile will continue to play an important role in voice tech’s growth.

Currently, 36 per cent of UK smartphone users say that they regularly use voice search or commands on their phones, increasing to 43 per cent for Londoners and 52 per cent for 18-34 year olds. Checking the weather or news, asking general questions, playing music or searching for directions are the top four things voice tech on mobile is used for.

We expect this to not only increase, but also broaden out into other areas. However, marketers nevertheless need to bear in mind that voice is best suited for specific, focused queries with one objective answer. Moving beyond this, user frustrations can arise – one of the key observations from our research. This is where the additional screen-based nature of mobile could play a role, providing additional information or suggestions in a visual format to complement the voice result.

Visual search
Although voice remains the more immediate priority for marketers in our view, visual search is also fast emerging, with image recognition technology like Google Lens leading the charge. Phones and the cameras within them will be paramount to the rise of visual search, where image is used as the input to search rather than text.

Our research has shown that even though the tech is still emerging, this form of search already feels familiar, quick and intuitive to people who are used to seeing output in image format and increasingly communicate via images too. The neuroscience part of our study revealed that visual search is best used for moments focused on inspiration, exploration and discovery, and for visual based categories like beauty or fashion.

Due to its familiarity, the benefits of using visual search feel obvious to the consumer. However, the problem lies in them being so comfortable with the concept that they want to use it for functions outside the technology’s current remit – to identify issues or provide complex solutions. In many ways however, this is a positive; if these needs can be satisfied, it will create new types of search moments.

The main problem for marketers to solve will be determining the intent behind visual search. It is very hard to determine what the user wants from an image and what they would like the technology to do as a result. Often complex tasks don’t have an obvious starting point, and an image can literally “paint a thousand words” – eliciting frustration for the user if the tech doesn’t get it right. Mobile could provide the bridge to ease this frustration, with voice or codes acting as complementary inputs.

Text will continue to do the heavy lifting of search, but these other search formats will also be woven into the search journey, most likely not in isolation, but alongside one another, particularly where mobile is concerned. Visual will likely trigger searches and then text and voice will be used to refine queries later along the search journey.

Search journey
It will be important for brands to consider the user’s entire search journey and where and when different types of search might come into play, and on which devices. For voice, brands will also need to ensure that their SEO strategy considers how content is surfaced in voice search. Building voice and visual search into owned platforms should also be a big consideration.

We are already on a journey towards a future of ‘assistive’ search. The application of AI to data signals in the coming years will allow us to apply even more insight to meeting search needs, becoming more proactive, predicting intentions and reducing the effort required of the end-user.

Consumers are typically open to the concept of data-enabled assistive search, if the output is genuinely useful. Indeed, we found a certain level of assistive search was already expected, with some people no longer typing ‘near me’ into their location based mobile queries, as the assumption is that this is implicit. For brands, in this world of assistive search, the shift in focus will move from primarily buying keywords to buying audiences and intents.

The search landscape continues to evolve at pace and there is no doubt that big changes will keep coming thick and fast. What is certain however, is that mobile is set to play a big role in this transformation and should be a key part of marketers’ search strategy going forward.