T-Mobile ties up with Yahoo to deliver search on phones

T-Mobile USA, the country's fourth-largest mobile phone service provider, on Thursday said it's teaming up with Yahoo to deliver search functions for most of its mobile phones.

Yahoo has been building its mobile offerings for years with features that range from messaging services like e-mail and instant messaging to user-friendly shopping and downloading functions. T-Mobile said the service, which debuts this week, is called Web2go.

In addition to Web surfing capabilities, Web2go comes complete with customisable home page that provides access to news, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr photos and Web images. On Yahoo's behalf, Medio Systems will conduct searches for ringtones, wallpaper, games and other content available in the T-Mobile Store.

T-Mobile USA said the Yahoo service will be available on most of its new phones, including handsets made by Motorola, Nokia, Research In Motion, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson. Yahoo also provides search capabilities for AT&T and, when combined with T-Mobile's subscriber base, will reach over 105 million customers.

"We believe mobile Web access appeals to everyone, and Web2go makes it easier than ever for customers to surf the Web," Denny Marie Post, T-Mobile's chief marketing officer, said in a statement. "Web2go provides a storefront that will continue to grow with our customers, offering a range of products from the latest content to new innovative applications."

The deal is the latest major development in mobile search as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and some smaller companies jockey for position as mobile search begins to take off. Earlier this month, T-Mobile unveiled its G1 phone, an HTC handset based on Google's Android platform complete with Google search capability. (See: Android operating system to power Google's first mobile handset, G1)

Thursday's move to install Yahoo's mobile search technology on most T-Mobile phones had something of a precedent earlier this year in Europe when T-Mobile USA's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, replaced Google on many of its mobile phones with Yahoo's mobile search function.

Microsoft has also been intensifying its mobile search efforts. The company has put a full-court press complete with attractive incentives on Verizon Wireless to attempt to sign up the service provider for its mobile features.

At stake is the nascent phenomenon of surfing the Web on mobile phones, a practice still in its infancy as more sophisticated smart phone models hit the market almost daily and as wireless infrastructure becomes more robust.

Between Google and Yahoo, the two search engine companies combine for nearly 80 per cent of the Web search market. But, according to survey firm comScore, only about 7 per cent of mobile device users actively use search on their phones. So it remains to be seen what kind of revenue boost this deal will provide to Yahoo, which recently has been doing anything possible to boost its cash flow.