Opera Says Google Dominating Search On Mobile Web

Opera, the leading independent mobile browser, has been putting out great data on mobile Internet usage for quite some time. Google always ranks as one of the top sites globally. However this month’s “State of the Mobile Web” report is the first time that the company has released search market share data.

It shows Google with a lead comparable, almost exactly, to its market share on the PC in the US. Yahoo enjoys a larger share of mobile search than it now does on the PC, according to Opera. And Bing is virtually non-existent.

The caveat to all this is that Opera only captures usage on the Opera browser, which is not available on the iPhone (yet). It is for Android and RIM. But the data below generally do not reflect the full range of user behavior on smartphones. We can reasonably extrapolate from Opera’s findings, however, that Google enjoys a comparable dominance in mobile across platforms. For example it’s more dominant on the iPhone than the numbers below reflect.

There have been mobile search data released in the past via surveys and by Nielsen showing comparable share trends.

Compare US comScore search share data for January:

• Google: 65.4 percent
• Yahoo: 17 percent
• Bing: 11.3 percent
• Ask: 3.8 percent
• AOL: 2.5 percent