Yahoo! and Opera partner for the new oneSearch mobile service

by: admin Monday, January 8th, 2007

Rating: sounds interesting

Yahoo! has announced an exclusive partnership with Opera. The new Yahoo! oneSearch™, which goes live globally in Q1 2007, will be featured on the Opera Mini ™ and Opera Mobile ™ browsers.

The new search service will apparently offer “a completely new mobile search service”. The service is said to recognize the intent of a search term and presents relevant content. The results will not just be a list of Web Links to PC sites but will be grouped by subject.

Furthermore, Yahoo! and Opera have agreed to exclusively work together to explore bringing mobile advertising into the Opera Mobile browser.

From the press release:“We are happy to announce this strategic cooperation with Yahoo! on mobile search,” says Jon S. von Tetzchner, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Opera Software. “Opera has shipped more than 50 million mobile browsers and our experience is that search is one of the most important services to be included in a mobile browser. Therefore it has been important for us to find a partner that will work closely with Opera to optimize the user experience.”

Opera will deliver Yahoo! Search through its distribution channels for Opera Mini, including direct free-to-consumer downloads and through partnerships with content providers, device manufacturers and mobile operators. Opera and Yahoo! will also jointly market the availability of Yahoo! Search on Opera Mobile to help drive consumer awareness and usage.

What do we think?
Opera Mini is a simple to download easy to use mobile search engine that headlines a number of popular brands already. On the new 3.0 version you can view: BBC News, CreativeCommons, Dictionary.com, eBay, Google Images, Google News, I’m Feeling Lucky, Technorati, Weather Undergound and Wikipedia. As the popularity of the Opera browser increases Yahoo! needs to be on the home page. At present it’s a white label engine at the top of the page then Google then Wikipedia. Yahoo! Will no doubt be sandwiched in between Google and Wikipedia from April.

There is concern however that this is Yahoo!’s third mobile brand. Yahoo! has Yahoo! Go, Yahoo! Mobile and now Yahoo! onesearch. Consolidation is likely in the future in order to avoid confusion. Also, white label mobile search companies have been offering contextualisled search terms for over a year now – so Yahoo! oneSearch is playing catch-up.