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.

As a result of the mobile search surge, Google’s mobile ad revenues are similarly projected to double from approximately $2.5 billion in 2011 to $5.8 billion in 2012.

To read more from Chatterjee’s interview with Tech Crunch, click here.

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.

As of December 2011, Android only controls a 16.2 percent market share of mobile web browsing. In second place behind Apple is Java ME with a 21.3 percent market share.

iOS reached a zenith in its market share during October 2011 with 61.5 percent. But despite having lost some ground in recent months, Apple still managed to close out 2011 well off the company’s 2011 market share low of 46.6 percent last February.

To read the full report from NetMarketShare, click here.

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.

Still, despite Bing’s tremendous growth since its inception, Google remains the top dog of search engines by a wide margin, according to comScore data.

While both Yahoo and Bing now each control about 15 percent of the search engine market, 65 percent still belongs to Google alone – more than Yahoo and Bing put together.

“For comparison to last year,” McGee writes, “comScore measured Google’s market share at 66.2 percent in November 2010, while Yahoo was at 16.4 percent and Bing at 11.8 percent.”

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.

Additionally, there is a new “saved search” functionality, which allows users to save search filter settings (e.g. open now, free wifi, price range, and outdoor seating) and use the same criteria over and over without having to re-enter the specific filters, for frequent searches.

“As smartphones become more ubiquitous we’re finding that increasing numbers of consumers are turning to Yelp on their mobile devices to find amazing businesses nearby,” says Andrea Rubin, Vice President North American Marketing. “Through this relationship and the new features we’ve created for T-Mobile users, we hope to increase the ease of use and decrease the amount of time and taps that it takes for someone to find a great local business.”

“T-Mobile is excited to work with Yelp to provide this compelling feature exclusively for our customers,” adds Torrie Dorrell, Vice President of Applications, Content and Games for T-Mobile USA. “The enhanced Yelp application for Android devices is another great example of the differentiated experiences T-Mobile is bringing to market by working closely with partners.”

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.”

Mobile search volumes have increased 168% year-over-year.

“Retail searches on desktop rose by 35% y/y in q3,” adds Peter Fitzgerald, Retail Director for Google.

“Home and Garden saw strong growth in July, while it was back-to-school searches which fueled the August increase, with Consumer Electronics in particular seeing phenomenal growth in tablet’ searches,” Fitzgerald adds.

“September also saw an uplift, as Christmas gift related searches began to appear. This is unsurprising given that many consumers are Christmas shopping earlier this year, in order to spread the cost and avoid disruption due to bad weather. International searches for UK retailers also saw a massive uplift last quarter, as countries already originating large volumes of searches such as Russia, Pakistan and Mexico saw increases of between 90% and 300% y/y,” he concluded.

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.

What this means is that ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform much better in AdWords compared to sites that retain their PC-based design — meaning they’ll drive more mobile traffic at a lower cost.  A recent study which asked users about the performance of mobile websites found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone, proving once again how important having an optimized mobile presence really is.

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.

The idea is that a display ad becomes much more powerful when people can see which of their friends and contacts have chosen to endorse it.  On the Web, the +1 button and recommendations will appear at the bottom of display ads, then fade out until the viewer hovers over the ad.  On mobile, the +1 button will replace the existing “g” logo and recommendations will appear for several seconds before fading out.

The buttons placed on display ads will also work together with buttons on search results, search ads, and Websites — meaning a single +1 applies to the same content across the Web, no matter where it appears.  While the theory is solid, I’m not sure people will be “+1ing” ads as much as Google hopes.  Will you?

As part of the Senate Judiciary hearings today, former FTC official and new Google employee, Suzanne Michel, said that a full two-thirds of Google’s mobile search traffic comes from iOS devices, even though recent Android trends suggest otherwise.  She also detailed the fact that Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all bid to become the default search engine on future iOS devices — with Google obviously submitting the winning bid.

There’s long been theories that while Android is doing well, its users might primarily be using these devices as so-called “dumb phones.”  There was also data released today indicating that airport WiFi is mostly used by iOS devices as well.  A lot of this could be attributed to the extreme popularity of iPads, but it’s still food for thought.

This user base primarily turns to mobile location services for help with directions, locating a particular destination, or to engage with social media platforms.

The results of the survey are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted April 26-May 22, 2011.

Other insightful findings include:

• 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location—that works out to 23% of all adults.
• A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.
• 9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults.

“Taken together,” Pew reports, “28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either online or using their mobile phones—and many users do several of them. This is the Pew Internet Project’s most expansive study of location services to date; in previous surveys, we have asked only about the use of geosocial or “check in” services.”

To learn about the report and its findings, click here.

“44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates,” Google says, based on established patterns of mobile query growth in recent years.

Since 2009, mobile shopping “patterns” have seen two consistent and profound spikes. The first comes during Black Friday – the shopping bonanza that follows Thanksgiving – and the second is the weekend before the Christmas holiday.

According to Google’s data, mobile users who turn to their handsets for product and gift searches are among the shoppers most likely to actually buy something – either that which they are searching for or something very similar.

From Search Engine Land:

Citing data from a 2011 AdMob survey the company says that 65 percent of respondents answered “yes” to the following question: “Have you used your smartphone to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business-in-person?” But there’s lots of other data that validate the directional accuracy of this “mobile search-to-store” user pattern.

Consequently, Google is projecting that the 2011 holiday shopping season will be the most bustling on record for mobile search and mobile commerce.