Yahoo+Telefonica: oneSearch on additional 100M handsets

By Vivek | October 1st, 2007 at 06:29 pm ET         

While Google might has the Ad-supported GPhone under works, others are not keeping still either. In a major deal today, Yahoo announced that it has partnered with telcom operator Telefonica. With this deal, Yahoo Mobile services will end up on mobile phones of over 100 million customers of the Spanish telecom company.  

Services being offered include Yahoo! oneSearch, which will show up as the search engine partner on their mobile portals in Ireland, Latin America and the UK. As always, Flickr comes in the mashup game, and and so does Yahoo! Mail through Telefonica?s Mail Express service.

Although the deal is definitely good for Yahoo, there are few points to consider. Yahoo thinks that it’s oneSearch will be able to provide just the right kind of search experience for all these outside US locations. I think, this would be a tough nut to crack ’cause mobile search tends to be local in my opinion. Since Yahoo Search has struggled for most part of the times in US, not sure what different they plan do out there. Besides that, returns from non-US locations are definitely going to be far less as compared to what Google will extract in US.