Gomez, Inc. and dotMobi have joined together to rate mobile sites across several verticals according to how well they perform on the mobile internet. The criteria and ranking methodology used included the following benchmarks:

• Discoverability – how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.
• Readiness – how well the mobile Web site renders on popular mobile devices.
• Availability – the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
• Response time – how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
• Consistency – how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.

Here are the results for the search category:

The overall “winner” was Yahoo. Here are the results in the other two categories examined:

• Banking — Bank of America was the overall number 1
• Airlines — AirTran was overall number 1

As the five criteria above suggest, this study measured overall mobile web performance. What’s not immediately clear is whether the Yahoo site that won is the recently launched (and much improved) Yahoo Mobile or the “old” mobile oneSearch. My sense is that it’s the old oneSearch because this study was a few months in the making.

Related Topics: Google: Mobile | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Top News | Yahoo: Mobile & Go

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling