Google dominates the mobile web search in the US with more than 9% of all web page views, outpacing its rivals Yahoo and Bing which accounted for 4.3% and 0.3% of all page views, respectively, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report.
According to the report, Opera Mini was used by 50 million people in January 2010, an increase of 7.4% from December 2009 and up 149% compared to January 2009. Page views on Opera Mini increased 208% from January 2009, with users generating over 337 million MB of data for operators globally.
Geographically, Vietnam and India are the biggest users of search portals with 30.9% and 22.1% of page views, respectively. The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage in January 2010 were Russia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine, China, South Africa, the US, Nigeria, Vietnam and the UK. Opera Mini users in Ukraine used the search portals the least with 0.8% of page views from search portals.
Lebanon and Syria lead the top 10 Middle Eastern countries in terms of page-view growth with 53.6% and 693.8%, respectively. UAE and Iraq lead in growth of unique users with 655.6% and 558.3%, respectively. The top 10 countries using Opera Mini are Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Lebanon, Iraq and Kuwait.
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The study found that Google is at the top of the rankings in nine out of the top 10 countries in mobile web users in the Middle East, while Facebook took the top spot in Israel and stood second in six of the top 10 countries, third in three of the top 10 countries.
Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera Software, said: “Search and social networking are the twin pillars of mobile web use worldwide. While Google performs well globally, we also see several local search engines, such as Yandex in Russia and Ukraine, and Baidu in China, have impressive results in their key markets.”
