Mobile is clearly the future. In fact, by the end of this year, it’s estimated that 25-30% of all web searching will be done from mobile devices. What does this mean for the legal business?
The answer is clear: law firms must embrace mobile. That 25-30% of web searching will necessarily include clients on mobile devices. And those clients will be using new mobile search technologies, such as:
- Google Knowledge Graph: This adds a summary window to a search results page, much like a mini encyclopedia article about the topic, along with the customary links to other sites about the topic. The more well-known the person, place, or thing the more details that surface. Available for sometime now on the Google app, it recently launched as an iPhone app.
- izik: This is a new and cool search engine optimized for tablets. It provides a very touch, swipe, and graphic rich tablet search experience.
- Facebook Graph Search (still in beta): This new search tool from Facebook, purportedly in the works for years, is designed to search the huge amount of data on Facebook. In searching over 1 billion Facebook profiles, 24 billion photos, and 1 trillion connections, Graph Search could:
- Uncover what restaurants, stores, companies your friends have liked and recommended
- Uncover Facebook contacts who work at the company or know someone who does
- Find friends or friends of friends who are lawyers, legal administrators, teachers, etc., who might help you make some key contacts for job openings
The bottom-line is that mobile users will be searching for lawyers and law firms, and so firms need to make sure they can be found where those users can find them–on mobile devices.
