Mobile is waiting in the wings, ready to take the place of the desktop search as top dog. That's what a recent interview with Google's head of mobile operations in the Financial Times might lead you to believe.

According to Google's Vic Gundotra, the search giant received 50 times the search traffic from the iPhone than any other mobile device. So much more, they couldn't believe the numbers were accurate at first. “We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Gundotra said.

One nice thing about the iPhone is how easy Apple makes it perform a Google search from within the iPhone's Safari browser. No doubt this contributed greatly to the amazing results Google tabulated.

And while you can decide to change the search option to Yahoo within Settings, it's apparent most iPhone users either don't know this or have consciously decided to stick with Google. ,Why should search trends on the iPhone prove any different from than those on the PC or Mac.

Since Google earns most of its revenue through advertising, the more people go to it to fulfill their search needs the more money it earns. This applies as much to the fledgling mobile arena, which, in Gundotra's words, is growing "above expectations" in usage and revenue, as it does to the desktop.

And its not just Google that's benefiting from the iPhone's ease of use. The first carrier to offer the iPhone, AT&T, earns twice as much per iPhone user than with other smartphones due to the far greater data usage the iPhone encourages.

Part of a mobile phone and smartphone vendor's job is to create devices that help maximize revenues for their carrier customers. Since the iPhone has done this for its operator partners by making it easier than ever to access the Web from a mobile device—and therefore driving data usage way upwards—Google's Gundotra expects other manufactures will start to pay closer attention to ease of use with their products as well. Should this happen, Gundotra predicts mobile search could overtake fixed (or desktop) search “within the next several years.”

Overall, Google is paying closer attention to the mobile market than ever—with its own mobile platform, Android; the introduction of new, more iPhone-friendly versions of its applications; and the recent roll out of a download to place a Google search box directly on the idle or home screen of Nokia's Symbian-run, S60-interface phones, by far the most popular smartphones in the world.