If Global Stats from StatCounter are to be believed, Microsoft and Yahoo! might as well pack their bags and say goodbye to mobile search, because Google reportedly owns 97% of the market.
Data pulled from the 4 billion page views collected across more than 3 million websites that use the StatCounter analytics solution showed that Google monopolises the mobile search market. The search giant, whose brand is now a neologism for searching, delivered 96.23% of mobile searches worldwide in the first half of 2009.
Yahoo! follows second, worldwide, with 3.24% mobile search market share and Yandex.ru is third with 0.14%. Ask Jeeves (0.11%) and AltaVista (0.07%) round off the top 5 mobile search providers. The rest, including Microsoft, account for no more than 0.21% of the worldwide mobile search volume.
In the UK, the situation is similar, with Google commanding 98.8%, followed by Yahoo! (0.86%) and, surprisingly, Ask Jeeves (0.14%).
Before screaming “anti-trust” or falling into depression caused by the world turning into a Googleopoly, let’s take a moment to examine the data…
While the size of StatCounter’s data set is nothing to laugh at, most of its volume comes from fixed internet websites rather than mobile sites. In fact, the page views and number of sites using StatCounter to track visitor data on the mobile Internet is bound to be much, much lower.
That’s not all. StatCounter data itself is not wholly credible due to the fact that they use cookies and JavaScript to track visitors, both of which often don’t work when websites are viewed 0n a mobile device. Therefore, any data delivered by StatCounter is only valid for a small subset of all the different mobile phones consumers use to search the Internet.
Last year, Nielsen reported that Google’s mobile search market share in the USA was an estimated 61%, while Yahoo! and Microsoft got 18% and 5% respectively. Not a lot has changed in the mobile search market since June 2008, which makes it safe to assume that Nielsen’s numbers would not be drastically different today.
This still leaves us back at square one, asking “has Google already won the race for mobile search supremacy before it even really began”?
