We use apps on our mobile devices to look up things, which indirectly means a serious drop in ad revenues for all major search engines – Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

According to a report, in 2014, Google mobile ads had seen a 17 percent drop in revenue as compared to 2012. At that time, Google-owned 82.8 percent of the $2.24 billion search market. Now, the revenue generated by U.S. mobile ad market brings in around $17.73 billion, but Google’s share dropped to mere 65.7 percent.

What are we doing differently now? We are fragmented in the way we search now. Google gives us the answer for everything, but it won’t necessarily be able to help us find the best restaurant in just one click. That’s when we use niche apps, for instance, Zillow to search for homes, Zomato to find restaurants, and so on.

Earlier this year, another consumer report confirmed the shift to mobile – on an average, people spend 34 hours using the Internet on smartphones every month, while on 27 hours on the desktop.

According to the eMarketer report, we perform a lot of local searches. This is a good news for local business search companies such as Yelp. By 2016, Yelp’s revenues are expected to increase 3 folds. On the other, this change in consumer behavior can mean an expected drop to 64.2 percent of the overall market share for Google. Note that Goggle is not losing its revenue. They are earning more, moneywise but they are just capturing less of the overall market than before.

The bottom line is that niche apps are changing the way we search online. And, they are able to do this only because we spend more time for searching things on mobile devices than on computers.