Mobile search not as different as we thought

Greg highlights a recent WWW 2009 paper, Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my!. The authors analyze a sample of 100,000 mobile queries from last summer. One interesting note:

Perhaps the most surprising finding is that there is only 1.7% more local queries issued from an iPhone than from a computer.... We believe that mobile users will continue to search for a higher proportion of local content than computer users, but may look for this information within an application that can provide a richer experience than what a browser can provide.

In short, mobile search queries look a lot like search queries from a desktop computer.