Google managed to spank the rest of the mobile search world during the first quarter of 2008, according to data from Nielsen Mobile. The search giant managed to capture 61 percent of the mobile search market in the first four months of the year, with Yahoo! taking a very distant second at 18 percent. MSN sat at third place with a measly 5 percent.

The data comes almost four months after Google said that the number of mobile searches coming from iPhones was 50 times higher than any other handset. The discrepancy was so large that the company had engineers double-check the logs to make sure it wasn't a mistake, but it turns out that it was all true. Despite the fact that smartphones have existed for far longer than Apple's, it seems that—according to Google's data—folks hadn't been using the Internet (and, in turn, search engines) on their mobile devices like they are in the post-iPhone world.

Surely this is part of the reason why Google has skyrocketed to the top of Nielsen's mobile search list. Google is set as a factory default search engine on all iPhones, with Yahoo! being offered as a secondary option (no Microsoft search product is available as a default on the iPhone, although users can navigate to the pages on their own if they so please).

Speaking of default search settings, however, Nielsen's statistics are still surprising in other ways. For one, with the sheer number of Windows Mobile phones in the wild, why don't Microsoft's search options (MSN and Live Search) have a larger share? Windows Mobile 6 offers Live Search as a home screen option in its browser, and yet the search engine didn't even make its way into third place; however, WM6 owners can also install Opera Mini, which offers Yahoo as a default search engine. Anecdotally, Opera Mini tends to be quite a popular browser alternative among friends who use WM6 and BlackBerry devices, which could be part of the reason why Yahoo managed to creep into second place on Nielsen's list.

Another fairly major mobile search option that didn't make the cut is the mobile version of Ask.com. With basically zero phones offering Ask.com as a default search engine, it's all but impossible to capture any significant share until mobile Internet use becomes as commonplace as desktop Internet use.

Although Google and Yahoo! dominated Nielsen's charts, they are still not without vulnerabilities. Less than half (44 percent) of mobile Google users rated their experiences toward the high end of the scale, leaving a lot of room for improvement. Yahoo! users were similar, with about 40 percent rating the search engine relatively high. The majority of both users were searching for general information on their mobile phones, although 29 percent of Google users and 24 percent of Yahoo users were looking for local listings. With increasing GPS and location-aware capabilities of today's mobile phones, both search engines should be able to offer more targeted, local search results to users who are on the go.