The new Place Pages for Mobile will provide relevant information about places of interest in a given neighbourhood, to people on the go. Apart from giving the exact location of a shop, hotel, restaurant, tourist spot or any other business, the service will also provide a lot of detailed information about the place, including opening times, users reviews, ratings and images of the place.

As with the regular Place Pages, the mobile Place Pages can be accessed by clicking on the relevant location pinpointed on Google Maps.

Instead of including a mini map within the place pages, Google requires users to instead have to click on a ‘map’ button, which isn’t really smart for a mobile interface where fewer clicks are always better.

At present, the new Place Pages for Mobile are only available on Android-powered handsets and the iPhone and iPod in the U.S.A.

Interested users can view the service through a google.com search on their smartphones. They then have to click on the relevant local business listing on the search results page.

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.