To use a variation on a familiar phrase, the iPhone changes everything. Indeed it has; and everything you ever wanted to know about iPhone adoption and usage is contained in a new report from comScore (“All about the iPhone“). The headline on the press release is about lower-income groups adopting the device for a broad range of activities (music, games, video and internet). Based on behavioral data from a sample of roughly 100,000 iPhone users in the US and Western Europe, the report goes into a great deal more than that. Below I do a quick “dive” into a couple of the search-related findings.

It’s fairly well established that iPhone users search more than other types of mobile phone users. But according to comScore a full quarter of iPhone owners are searching daily:

Source: comScore (8/08)

Regardless of phone type, the majority of search activity is coming through a browser (82 – 88 percent). And Google has been the biggest beneficiary of iPhone adoption, leading in the search, news and directories/local categories, according to comScore.

Here’s the report’s breakdown of mobile search market share in the geographies covered by the report:

Source: comScore (8/08)

Search users on the iPhone relate to the mobile browser in much the same way they conduct search on the desktop — search share in mobile generally parallels desktop share — though not yet with as much frequency. The average internet user, according to comScore, performs just over 18 searches per week (roughly 80 per month). But there will come a time, several years from now, when mobile search volume approaches and the overtakes the desktop.

As I said, there’s a great deal more in the document that covers the breadth of activities on the iPhone, broken down by category and demographic detail.

Whether you’re an Apple fan or critic, there can be no question that the iPhone has ushered in the era of the mobile internet. Among the search engines, despite Yahoo’s considerable mobile efforts, Google is the early leader. Now Google and its open-source mobile initiative Android hope to add fuel to the fire that Apple has started.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Stats: comScore

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling