Nielsen Mobile has just confirmed that Google leads the U.S. mobile search market with a 61 percent share of the market.
Google’s lead is followed by Yahoo!, with 18% market share. MSN lags far behind with only 5% share of the market in the first quarter of 2008.
Earlier, Hitwise and comScore had declared similar results for the general search market.
Nielsen has found that each Google visitor uses the mobile search facility about 9 times a month, on average, while Yahoo! visitors use mobile search about 6.7 times a month on an average, in spite of Yahoo! providing a much wider range of mobile services than Google.
It has also been established that the majority of mobile search users are male, with Google having 65% and Yahoo! having 63% male users respectively.
The most frequently searched for categories on mobile devices were found to be information, local listings and navigation to specific websites, in that order. Users of both Google and Yahoo! query these search categories in almost the same proportion.
On a scale of 1-10, 44% of Google users said their experience with mobile search could be rated between 8 and 10, while only 40% of Yahoo! users felt the same way.
James Watt, a software engineer with Google, has commented that Google’s mobile homepage has been updated to make it faster to upload. He says that Google is “obsessed” with the idea of speeding up mobile search.
