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”?

A range of popular products, their user ratings and price comparisons will be made available to users whenever and wherever they needs them, via Mobile Live Search. Detailed reviews and consumer opinions will also be available, allowing the user to thoroughly research the product before buying it.

Feature ratings through consumer reviews from across the web will be incorporated into the Live Search product listings. Henceforth, whenever consumers notice a new product in a store, they can use the Microsoft service to find out details about its performance, special features, compare it with similar products and also search for better prices before actually buying it on the spot.

Another interesting feature of Live’s Mobile Search offering will be made available to users in the U.K. and Japan – the ability to automatically pinpoint one’s location, based on the nearest mobile communication towers. Customers can then locate whatever they are searching for in the vicinity. However, the service currently works only on Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile’s networks.

Product search on mobile has been available on Google since September of last year. Microsoft’s service is not yet actually available in the Europe, as of the time of writing this story. However, the Mobile Live Search team will probably roll it out in time, a fact they have not considered important enough to mention in their announcement.