• The New York Times, Monday, January 14, 2008 11:01 AM

That Google Mobile Search has had outstanding success on Apple's iPhone underscores just how lucrative a market the mobile Web could be for Web firms. Why? Because the iPhone's mobile Web browser comes closest to resembling the experience of surfing on the Internet. And if internal Google-iPhone data is to be believed, then companies stand to benefit massively from the mobile browser transforming into something more like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple's Safari.

According to Google data, iPhone traffic to Google surged on Christmas Day, surpassing incoming traffic from all other mobile devices. It was only a few days later that iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices using the Symbian operating system (the iPhone runs on Apple's OS X). The data is significant because Symbian has a 63 percent share of the smartphone market for operating systems. By comparison, Apple has a 2 percent share.

For some reason, Apple's browser makes mobile surfers want to use Google more. Could it be the iPhone's browsing experience is most like using the traditional Internet? Needham & Company analyst Charles Wolf thinks so, explaining that the iPhone takes the frustration out of mobile Web browsing. Rival Yahoo also reports the iPhone accounts for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic. You can deduce, then, that a better browsing experience means greater usage of the mobile Web, and thus, higher traffic to mobile sites.

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