Internet search giant Google revealed this week that mobile search ad request volume doubled in late 2011 when compared to the same time frame in 2010.

In a new interview with Tech Crunch, Google’s mobile search ads chief Surojit Chatterjee admits that mobile search has increased five-fold in the past two two years alone.

Chatterjee says that quality of search ads is increasing thanks to some of the new factors being considered in mobile search ad rankings. For example, mobile web-optimized sites are now ranked higher. Since August 2011, Google has seen more than a 50 percent increase in the number of AdWords advertisers with a mobile optimized sites.

Continue Reading

2011 was a good year for Apple’s mobile operating system.

According to the most recent data made available, last year ended with iOS having secured a 52% market share of mobile web browsing.

Net Market Share reported Monday that Android – Google’s popular mobile operating system – significantly trails iOS with regard to leading mobile devices used to browse the mobile web.

Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Bing is steadily climbing the Internet ladder to become the no. 2 search engine on the web.

According to Matt McGee of Search Engine Land, “Bing’s slow growth in US search market share continues, and Microsoft’s two-and-a-half-year-old search engine is now practically neck-and-neck with Yahoo.”

Bing’s battle with Yahoo, however, strikes some as peculiar, particularly in light of the fact that Bing powers Yahoo search. And just last year, both companies struck a 10-year deal that will keep Bing in business with Yahoo on a number of fronts.

Continue Reading

The folks behind Yelp – the uber-popular digital destination for detailed local business reviews – have announced that a customized version of the Yelp mobile app is now preloaded on all Samsung Exhibit II 4G, T-Mobile myTouch and T-Mobile myTouch Q smartphones.

Since being founded in San Francisco in July 2004, Yelp has become a widely recognized, trusted, and digitally ubiquitous resource for digging deeper into the quality and general reputation of a business and its services.

According to details made available today by Yelp, the new app for T-Mobile Android devices features some pretty nifty filters to make searching for a business (and its associated reviews) even easier and faster than it already is.

Continue Reading

Mobile searches of the retail variety are ballooning at a rapid pace, according to a new report.

According to the BRC/Google Online Retail Monitor, “total retail search volumes grew at their fast rate this year increasing by 35% in the third quarter compared with the same quarter a year earlier.”

“Mounting pressures on household budgets may be generating more online retail searches as people work harder to compare prices and track down value,” says Stephen Robertson, British Retail Consortium Director General. “While searches grew 35 percent, their fastest this year, the BRC’s Retail Sales Monitor show growth in online spending has actually slowed to 10 percent suggesting extra searches are a symptom of bargain hunting.”

Continue Reading

Google has always been about creating the best user experience on mobile devices and has taken broad steps to encourage publishers to optimize effectively for mobile users as well.

For AdWords advertisers wanting to reach mobile screens, how you optimize your site or landing page plays a huge role in how and where your ads are displayed.  Last year, for example, Google started limiting ad serving on high-end mobile devices if they pointed to landing pages with Flash-heavy content.  Likewise, the search giant announced today via its “GoogleMobileAds” blog that it will introducing the mobile optimization of a Website as a new “ad-quality” factor for AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile search traffic.

Continue Reading

It was announced today that Google will begin adding +1 buttons to their Web and mobile display ads in early October, adding user photos and recommendations to the ads themselves.  The buttons were recently added in the same way to Google search results.

On its “Inside AdWords” blog today, Google said that +1 buttons have been installed on over a million Websites across the Web with more than 4 billion daily impressions.  By adding the buttons to display ads across both the Web and mobile, advertisers have the ability to run social-enabled ad campaigns that work across millions of sites on over 40 countries around the world.  The new feature is being added to display ads by default, though users can opt-out manually via their AdWords account.

Continue Reading