The Growing List of Things You Can Do With Google Maps – Brian Ussery, Blogoscoped.com

Great summary of the many new features rolled out for Maps over the past 6-8 weeks

Google and Yahoo! lead for mobile search traffic
– Alex Farber, nma.co.uk

Google and Yahoo! account for 79% of all mobile internet search traffic, according to the latest data from Nielsen Mobile.

Google was the most used mobile search engine in Q1 2008, accounting for 61% of share, with Yahoo! attracting 18% of usage. Consumers made an average of nine searches each month using Google, ahead of Yahoo! with 6.7 per month.

However, Nielsen discovered that mobile searches are similar regardless of search engine with information, local listings…… and websites the most common terms.

Google Speeds Up Mobile Search – Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch

Google made some improvements to its mobile search, making it load faster on most mobile browsers. It does this by caching the page.

Google also added an iGoogle link to its mobile homepage. It also now allows you to customize and rearrange the widgets on the mobile version of your iGoogle start page so what you see on your mobile iGoogle can be different than what you see on your desktop….. This should make iGoogle a much more viable mobile start page. And, arguably, you need a start page with shortcuts to your favorite content on your mobile browser more than you do on your desktop. It’s just faster that way.

An Eye-Opening Local Exercise – Greg Sterling

It’s probably quite rare that you sit down and perform the same search across multiple sites to compare results. However, it’s a very interesting and helpful exercise to observe the user experience and the quality of the data. In many cases results (springing from the same commercial databases) are comparable. In other cases they are not. In almost every case the user experience is different, sometimes dramatically so.