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The Growing Mobile Web

Cyril's picture
Posted by Cyril 13 weeks ago

Since the beginning of the find.mobi project, I've been charged with building its index, and so I've been crawling a lot of web sites. This has given me a good vantage point from which to view the growth of the mobile web, and to notice general trends. The overall impression I have today is of a continuous growth in content and new sites, but no tidal wave just yet. Broadly speaking, most of the leading desktop site owners have thought about their mobile visitors, and have created a mobile version of their site, even if they don't especially promote it. They are leading by example because of their popularity, in the same way the iPhone raises awareness of the existence of mobile web (even if users tend to confuse it as an "iPhone-web").
Another trend is of large numbers of personal and small business websites, which, akin to the late 90's, are mostly simple "presence pages" with company details or a few lines of personal information.

As I crawl the web to build the find.mobi index I try to discover the mobile version of a site, if one exists. To do this I try attaching the following common patterns to the base URL, both as prefix (subdomain) and suffix (the path): wap, m, mobi, mobile, imode, xhtml. These represent the most common conventions used to identify mobile versions of a website. Note that dotMobi domains are purposely omitted from this list since we don't need to "discover" them for the find.mobi index since we know them already.

It's interesting to see how the most popular URL conventions measure up:

  • 1st position: wap.site.com and site.com/mobile
  • 2nd : site.com/wap

    • The "wap" name is still popular, especially a lot of WAP1.0 Asian sites.

  • 3th: site.com/m
  • 4th: mobile.site.com
  • 5th: m.site.com
  • and then various combinations with "mobi", "imode", "xhtml" ...

Overall there are around 0.2% of web domains that have a mobile version. (This is not a precise figure but a rough estimation based on the millions of domains I've crawled)


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Posted by Cyril 13 weeks ago

Cyril's picture

Search engine addict & compliance hangman.

Posted by Scandiman 13 weeks ago

Interesting information. I've got a few questions about find.mobi, 1) How does "site.mobi" measure up in these statistics? and 2) how do I submit a site to find.mobi? I have a .mobi website that's been live for over a month now that isn't showing in the search results.

Thanks.

Posted by Cyril 13 weeks ago

mobi domains are purposely omitted from this list since we don't really need to discover them like we do the non-dotMobi domains - we know them already!. However it will be interesting to see how the .mobi domains behave (if they redirects or not, detects pc etc...) I may try to do that later on.

About find.mobi, there is no submit function but the zone file is used as a starting point. Email me ("contact" on my profile) your domain and I'll investigate why it doesn't show up.

Posted by Scandiman 12 weeks ago

Yes, you're right, discovery is generally a non-issue for you in regards to .mobi. I guess what I'm looking to see is how .mobi is faring in comparison with the other naming conventions in terms of actual numbers.

I've sent you the information regarding my live .mobi site, thanks for your investigation.

Posted by Scandiman 10 weeks ago

Hi Cyril, just wanted to check in on this issue again, my site still isn't showing up. The url is http://alcatraz.mobi. Thanks.