Yahoo dives into mobile search

Yahoo has expanded its oneSearch mobile search offering to all device users. The offering previously was bundled with the Yahoo Go for Mobile application that is available on a limited number of handsets only.

The search engine makes an attempt to interpret search queries by offering result that are grouped. A search for a name for instance offers results including news articles, websites, special mobile sites, web images and Flickr photos. The results for a restaurant search offer links to listing for the company, business categories as well as web and mobile web results.

Mobile internet and mobile search is considered the next major internet growth market. Mobile phones already outship PCs by a wide margin. High speed data services meanwhile are gaining in popularity and devices such as Apple's upcoming iPhone are making it easier to navigate the mobile web.

Mobile search currently is limited. Most mobile web browsing is limited to pages that are offered directly by mobile operators. But as users are getting more comfortable with browsing the web on their mobile devices, they are expected to embrace search in the same way that they did on regular computers.

The mobile search market today is dominated by so-called white label search providers that allow operators to offer their own search engine. Microsoft in February 2006 became a major player in that field through the purchase of MotionBridge.

While it favours pages written in extensible HTML that are optimised for mobile internet users when it ranks search results, it doesn’t interpret queries like Yahoo does.

Yahoo is aiming its service squarely against Google's. The company has published a PDF document that highlights the differences between the two services.

Mobile phone users can access the service by surfing to http://m.yahoo.com on their mobile device.

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