Yahoo and Microsoft have both made advancements in the "mobile" market recently, but Google was nowhere to be seen. This has left some observers feeling a little baffled, and one even asked, "Is Google flubbing mobile search?"
GigaOM's Katie Fehrenbacher posed that question to start off her article on the subject. "If it is up to consumers and brand recognition alone, the company could easily dominate many of the world's mobile search markets," she notes.
But "carriers, and handset makers, still dominate the mobile deck," Fehrenbacher continued (as Yahoo fans pointed towards the Linksys CIT310). "Yeah, mobile web users can just type in any web site in a mobile browser, but the deck still dominates mobile eyeballs and some carriers don't want to do a deal with such a dominant search brand like Google."
Vodafone was more than happy to arrange for a strategic alliance with Yahoo last week, though, and Sprint and Microsoft worked out a similar deal. Fehrenbacher constructed a timeline of "Google's mobile search deals with advertisers" for comparison, and the company seemed to come up a little short.
Google's five most recent deals were with Leap Wireless, SK Telecom, NTT DoCoMo, Celecom, and Optus - names that simply don't carry a lot of weight. Fehrenbacher concluded her article by polling her readers about their mobile search habits, however, and as she predicted at the beginning of the piece, the numbers clearly favor Google.
50% of respondents chose the Mountain View-based company. The only other answer with comparable numbers was "You can search on mobile phones?" with 30% of the vote.
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Tag: Mobile market, Mobile market
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