A new study from Fivesight Research, “US Consumer Search Preferences Smartphone & Desktop: Q1 2017,” finds that Siri is the mobile “search engine” of choice after Google. The study was based on a survey of 800 US adults split roughly evenly between iOS and Android users. Google was by far the dominant mobile search engine, with an 84% aggregate share among respondents. Among Android users, Google’s search share was 90%. Among iPhone owners Google had a 78% share. After Google, however, Siri was named by more respondents as their “primary search engine” than Bing or Yahoo. (However, this doesn’t reflect query volume, just identification as the primary engine of choice.) Siri was the primary search engine of 13% of iPhone owners. This finding is significant because it suggests the long-term, potentially disruptive impact of voice and virtual assistants on traditional “query in a box” results. It’s important to point out, however, that these responses reflect self-reported data and many not line up one-to-one with behavior. Siri was also the most widely adopted virtual assistant among the available choices, used by a higher number of iOS users than “Google Now” was by Android users. Google Assistant wasn’t one of the available choices on the survey. A very large percentage of respondents (72%) said they were using virtual assistants to “supplement” more traditional mobile search. Only 16% of iPhone owners did not use a virtual assistant, while just under 40% of Android users did not. Among iPhone owners who used assistants other […]