Yahoo! announced today that it has been named the “Exclusive Search Service” for the Telefonica mobile portal in Spain. As the largest operator in Spain, Telefonica Espana can push a lot of people through Yahoo! on mobile – which is especially tasty for the search provider since it will be handling the search advertising as well. This is part of a larger agreement to roll out Yahoo! on Telefonica mobile portals in 15 countries across Europe and Latin America. But how does it stand up to Google on mobile?
What’s the deal?
Yahoo! is providing a pretty comprehensive deal for Telefonica. Almost any data that a subscriber accesses through the portal will be provided by Yahoo! It will be providing all the usual things like search, news, weather and travel info – but also mobile websites, ringtones, games and other mobile content. And it will have a “questions” service that answers subscriber questions from a combined Wikipedia-Yahoo! Answers source.
What we think?
Recent statistics put the Google share of mobile search at 95-100%. Where is Yahoo in that? Down at the 2% end of things. NOW, it should be remembered that those stats are for mobile browser usage. Google completely dominates mobile browser search – but we’re not really talking about mobile browser search here. Before I upgraded to my Nexus One, my primary device was a Nokia N73. Not a smartphone, by today’s standards, but it was capable of web services. And when I logged on to the O2 portal, all my searches were powered by Yahoo! So when we’re talking about feature phones, you can imagine that the Yahoo! stats are a bit better.
But probably only a bit.
And with the way things are going in mobile, operator portals aren’t going to be the primary point of access for most mobile users – especially not in the Western world. It’s really hard to see operator deals helping Yahoo! much against the Leviathan in the Search Room.
