Just how dominant is Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in the mobile search market? According to StatCounter data, Google controlled 96.23 percent of the market in the first half of the year. As mobile marketing firm AccuraCast, which cites the data in a post points out, there are several reasons why the web tracker is almost certainly overstating Google’s success in the mobile market. Among them: StatCounter primarily tracks internet websites instead of mobile versions of those sites and StatCounter depends on cookies and JavaScript for its count, which don’t always work on mobile phones. (A comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) report from September showed that Google had 63 percent of the mobile search market in the United States, while Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) had 34.6 percent. Microsoft’s share was negligible. Google had an even larger lead in several Western European countries).
What’s clear however is that the shares of the major players have not shifted at all over the last seven months, at least according to the StatCounter numbers. That’s likely to change soon, though, since Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) announced a deal with Verizon (NYSE: VZ) earlier this year to become the default search provider on Verizon phones. That deal has just started to kick in over the last several weeks.
This is a ridiculous article. 96% of zero is zero. Pick up the phone and call a mobile operator, and ask them flat out – how many times do your customers actually use mobile search?
You will find the answer is very small.
Thanks for the comment. It's not zero.
Yes, search penetration on mobile phones is still relatively low — 9.2 percent in the U.S. — but that still amounts to around to 20.8 million people in the U.S. accessing search from their phones each month, according to comScore. And the numbers are growing rapidly. See lots of stats on the trends from comScore here: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/09/US_and_Western_Europe_Mobile_Search_Increases
– Joe Tartakoff, paidContent.org
96.23 percent of any market is a stranglehold no matter which way you look at it
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