There are now more than 1.1 million Web sites designed for mobile users, according to research from dotMobi. To help end users find the cream of the crop, dotMobi got together with Gomez to create a benchmark that tests and ranks the mobile Web experience provided by top businesses in airline, banking and search.

“Helping consumers better understand which of those sites will offer them a good experience – no matter what handset or operator they’re using – will help increase the use of the mobile Web,” said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi, (which created the .mobi Internet domain for identifying content that works on mobile phones). “Benchmarking allows businesses to see their sites in relation to the sites of their industry peers, which will also help drive the creation of more good sites for consumers to use.”

Gomez (which provides Web monitoring and measurement services) and dotMobi defined five key aspects of a successful mobile Web site: readiness; discoverability; speed; success; and consistency.

Readiness measures how well the mobile Web site renders on mobile devices, while discoverability gauges how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site. Availability tracks the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page; response time measures how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction; and consistency rates how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.

In the rankings from Gomez and dotMobi, the leading vendors across all five metrics were Yahoo (which earned first place among nine search companies) and Bank of America (the leader among six banking sites). There was a three-way tie by AirTran, Continental and Southwest for first place in the airline category.

Amazon, ASK and Google tied for second place in the search category. MSN took last place in the search category, hampered by poor scores in availability (94.5% compared to a category average of 98.9%) and response time (8.6 seconds compared to a category average of 6 seconds).

In the banking benchmark, Chase took second place despite placing last among the six banks in availability (97.3%). Bank of America’s biggest strengths were its discoverability, response time and consistency; it led the pack in those metrics.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.