Yahoo! tops the mobile search site benchmark

Due to the growing popularity of mobile internet access, wherein several users search for content on their mobile phones, it has encouraged Gomez Inc and dotMobi to create the world’s initial mobile web benchmark sequence in order to rank the top mobile sites on the basis of their effectiveness for customer operations.

The mobile search benchmark is a way to rank mobile search providers on five different criteria. These criterions are readiness, availability, response time, discoverability and the consistency in search operations carried out using a mobile handset. In this survey, only the better-known and larger service providers are considered. The selection of service providers was based on an expanded search query report conducted by comScore and published in July 2008.

For this survey, nine companies were selected which include Yahoo!, Google, Ask, AOL, Amazon, MSN, Craigslist, eBay and MySpace. In this survey, Facebook was not included as their mobile web applications failed to meet the desired technical requirements of this study.

To ensure a consistent playing field for the participants, a fixed task was set out along with a predetermined set of steps that were supposed to be used at the time of performing search operations on every participating provider.