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”?

The study was carried out by Technorati asked bloggers to list the sources they refer to the most for information. While 61 percent of bloggers surveyed said they referred to other blogs, 46 percent said they were influenced by the mainstream media sites.

Credibility is an important quality for blogs, and it often decides the number of links a blog receives.  If a blogger is found to be writing untrue and baseless posts, eventually other bloggers will stop linking to that blog. On the other hand, if true and relevant material is published on a blog, more and more bloggers will link in to that blog, thus bestowing more power and authority on that blog.

Based on the results of their study, Technorati has created the ‘Technorati Attention Index’, rating the top 50 mainstream media sites that were linked to by bloggers in the past month. The index will be updated every month.

The top 5 sites this month are:

• YouTube
• The New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN

In comparison, Techmeme’s Leaderboard rates the following  as the top five non-blog sources for bloggers:

• CNET News
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Computerworld

The complete list of top fifty sites rated by Technorati is available here.

This re-launched Go mobile platform from Yahoo! will open the doors to third-party application developers, just like Google’s Android project does. Yahoo! Go is relatively popular… quite a few users have actually downloaded the software onto their mobile phones. Other developers don’t need to convince users to do the same with their applications as well; they can just piggy-back on the Yahoo! platform now.

Download Yahoo! Go

Go 3.0 itself offers some impressive improvements, in the form of a more personalised homepage and an “upgraded user-interface”. The improvements make the entire user experience more conducive to browsing the Internet, or at least the Yahoo! Go-related Internet from a mobile phone. Some of the nicer features we liked were:

• Smooth browsing through Flickr photographs
• Easy integration with Yahoo! Mail
• Quick, free access to local information including traffic and weather

Yahoo! has also been busy developing what it likes to believe will be the next generation of web services, within a social setting. The CEO of the company, Jerry Yang personally attended CES 2008, where he demonstrated a new service that he called “Life with an exclamation point”, which aims to integrate different applications such as email, structured data, tags and other information in a social context and thus help users in multiple facets of their life through advanced technology.

This interface too will be open to third party application integration. Like Facebook, the new service’s homepage will also highlight relevant updates from various connections instead of just showing an inbox. Dan Farber at ZDNet has details and screenshots of the demo system.

As TechCrunch have noted, similar such platforms and strategies have been adopted in the past by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook. It remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Life!, which sounds eerily similar to Microsoft Live, will really provide anything new or if it will turn out to be just another copy of the same old platforms.

Yahoo! hope the two new offerings will enable their customers to use the Web more productively and more easily. However it will take a while for the complete new social package to be available due to security concerns, which must be addressed first. They expect to see some form of the platform during the year, but full functionality might not be available in 2008.

One hopes that these latest innovations will help to restore Yahoo! to its earlier place of pride vis-à-vis the internet, considering the fact that they used to be the stars of the Internet before Google came and rained on their parade. Share prices of Yahoo! Inc. have taken a beating off late while those of their competitor, Google Inc; have risen significantly, often at Yahoo!’s expense.

Fast Search and Transfer has made minor headlines in the past year with its mobile search product and deals forged with Virgin Mobile and Infospace. The company offers a range of services including enterprise search, eCommerce solutions, information management, mobile and online media to about 3500 companies, some of which fall in the Fortune 500.

As per the public declaration, Microsoft has offered Fast Search and Transfer US $3.56 per share, which is a 42 percent premium on its share price of Jan 4 2008. The total value of the deal is estimated to be US $1.2 billion or £600 million. The board of directors at Fast Search obviously consider this an excellent offer as they have unanimously recommended that its shareholders should accept it. Over 35% of the shareholders have already agreed to accept the offer.

As in all business deals there are observers and analysts who approve of the deal and those who do not. There are many who feel that $1.2 billion is too much money for a company like Fast, and that Microsoft should have waited a while and acquired the company at a lower price, once the recession, which the U.S. economy seems to be heading towards, had struck. Others believe that this is a smart move by Microsoft, and will help them further consolidate their position in the long run.

In all likelihood, the deal will have little impact on the overall search market, but will provide Microsoft access to a more robust mobile search offering and a new distribution network.

Search Engine Predictions

1. Google will continue to grow and play even tougher
2. Yahoo! will become the next AOL, suffer more layoffs, shut down more divisions but still stay independent
3. Microsoft will try rebranding and reorganizing its online brands again (to no avail)
4. Ask and AOL will continue being insignificant and border on the brink of becoming obsolete

Startup Predictions

1. Web services platforms will become the next battleground
2. Zoho, ThinkFree, Tumblr, Twitter and Digg will be acquired by larger companies
3. $27 billion of venture capital will be invested in startups and Mergers and Acquisitions will increase in volume but not as much in value
4. Consumer adoption of web office applications will grow

Advertising Predictions

1. Google AdWords will continue to grow and dominate the advertising market
2. Gadget Ads will present the area of greatest growth
3. Content networks will evolve and platforms will produce their own content (e.g. Google Knol)

Mobile Predictions

1. Mobile will finally happen!
2. Mobile web usage will grow
3. A second generation iPhone will be released to combat Google Phones (devices based on Android)

Social Media

1. Facebook will grow, but with a lot of bumps along the way
2. Privacy will become a greater concern
3. YouTube will announce HD video, ushering an era of ubiquity of online video
4. Facebook will forge independent deals with startups, making Google sweat!

Live Search Webmaster Center

One would expect that after taking so long to offer a resource for webmasters, the Live Search Webmaster Center would provide some snazzy tools and give a lot of good information that would justify its late arrival. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Live Search was officially released from closed beta on the 15th of November. This was accompanied by the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, where the Program Manager admitted, “We know we have a lot of work still to do and we would like to get your feedback on the tools as well as suggestions for future tools.”

Ironically, the first thing many webmasters noticed was that the feedback form did not work well. Frustratingly, what a large number of webmaster also noticed was that the tool was flawed.

Live Search Webmaster Tools currently has trouble accepting a number of websites. No official comment has been received about the reason behind this error or what is even causing it. A large number of webmasters who tried to add their sites were greeted with an error that says “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.”

For sites that are successfully added, the statistics provided are mostly regular fare: last crawl date, top 5 pages, keyword ranking, robots.txt validation, top 10 inbound links and top 10 outbound links. The only unique thing about this tool is the 5-point ranking system it provides for the domain, the top pages and the top links. This system is similar in principle to Google’s PageRank.

Google now accounts for more than 85 per cent of all searches in the country. Their market share is still growing, and it continues to do so at the expense of all three of its competitors.

The chart below shows the latest UK Internet search data from Hitwise for the four week period ending 20 September 2007 compared to four weeks ending 26 May 2007:

Source: Hitwise UK

Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! have clearly lost market share to Google, in spite of each of their individual efforts to win UK search clicks. Ask has invested in an ongoing television and billboard advertising campaign in the UK. Yahoo! has tried to generate a lot of publicity around their Panama platform, and Microsoft has rebranded and tried various half-hearted and wholly unsuccessful tactics.

Google’s lead has gone beyond the point where quality alone will win back users. Ask’s current search interface is far superior to Google’s Universal Search. It still has not won back any market share, partly due to poor quality of the main text results, but also because hardly anyone has even bothered to try using their improved interface.

Similarly, an improved advertiser experience alone will not win search traffic away from Google. Microsoft and Yahoo! should focus on winning search traffic before trying to woo advertisers.

• Core search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL)
• Top 50 properties (MySpace, Baidu, etc.)
• Vertical search locations (eBay, Amazon, Expedia, etc.)
• Cross-channel search (Images, news etc.)
• Local search
• Searches on partner sites that produce results from or direct users to core search engine results pages

Worldwide search reporting will be provided in the new format for select European and Asian countries.

The new reporting format comes in the wave of a series of changes being introduced in the way digital properties are being measured worldwide, with companies like Nielsen//Netratings ditching page views for time spent on a site as a better measure of online engagement.

For the month of July, Google continued to reign supreme in the USA, with over 55% of the total searches carried out in home, work and university locations. The expanded search query report for July 2007 showed market share divided as follows:

The same metrics for market share divided among the main media networks is as follows:

The full report can be viewed at the link below:

July qSearch 2.0 Report for USA