Yahoo! Tops Mobile Search Site Benchmark

Growth in mobile Internet access and the number of users perform search operations on their mobile phones has prompted dotMobi and Gomez Inc. to create the world’s first Mobile Web Benchmark Series, to rank the leading mobile sites with regards to their efficiency for customer operations.

The Mobile Search Benchmark is a means of ranking mobile search providers, with regards to five different criteria. They are, discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency for a search operation carried out through a mobile handset.

Only the larger, better-known search providers have been considered for this survey. The selection was based on comScore’s Expanded Search Query Report published in July 2008.

Nine companies were selected for this survey: Yahoo!, Amazon, Ask, Google, AOL, Craigslist, eBay, MySpace and MSN. Facebook was not included in this survey, as their mobile web applications did not meet the technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a uniform playing field for all participants, a predetermined task was set out, with a fixed set of steps to be used while performing the search operation on each participating provider. One had to first navigate to the home page of the mobile web site, type a search query, and then click on ‘search’. The search results page would then be displayed and would show the search result obtained for that specific query, which were then graded.

According to the study, Yahoo! has currently been ranked the best site for mobile search operations. The provider rankings within individual categories were as follows:

Discoverability

Ability of a consumer to discover the location of a company’s mobile site on the Web.

1. Google
   MySpace
   Yahoo!
2. AOL
   eBay
   MSN
3. Amazon
4. Ask
5. Craigslist

Readiness

Ability of the mobile web site to be rendered on popular mobile devices.

1. Ask
   eBay
   Yahoo!
2. Amazon
   AOL
   Craigslist
   Google
   MSN
3. MySpace

Availability

Percentage of successful transactions out of the total number of transaction attempts.

1. Google
2. Amazon
3. Craigslist
4. eBay
5. Yahoo!
6. MySpace
7. AOL
8. Ask
9. MSN

Response Time

Time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction.

1. Amazon
2. Google
3. Craigslist
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. MSN
9. eBay

Consistency

Standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions

1. Amazon
2. Craigslist
3. Google
4. Ask
5. Yahoo!
6. AOL
7. MySpace
8. eBay
9. MSN

Overall Ranking

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
   Amazon
   Ask
3. AOL
   Craigslist
   eBay
4. MySpace
5. MSN

The research also measured performance of mobile sites in other industry verticals. AirTran was found to be the highest ranked mobile airline site and Bank of America was ranked top for mobile banking.

Overall, though, the results indicated that mobile websites are 30% less efficient than traditional Internet sites.