Mobile Operators Combine Forces To Battle Search Engines

February 7th, 2007

Hardly one week after the Mobile Search Conference was held in London a group of mobile operators have announced that they will collaborate to prevent Google and Yahoo! from gaining dominance in the mobile search market.

It is just one week before the 3GSM conference in Barcelona and the mood has been set with this announcement. Vodafone, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Hutchison Whampoa and Cingular, are among the companies that will come together for secret, high-level talks at the mobile industry’s biggest annual trade show.

Representatives of Orange and Telecom Italia speaking at the Mobile Search Conference last week said that the operators aren’t necessarily worried about using Google or Yahoo!, in partnership, to deliver ads to users, so long as they can get the lion’s share of the revenues.

The European mobile market seems to be turning into a turf war between giants battling for supremacy of the airwaves. The consumers will win, in the long run, as data tariffs fall and handset quality is improved, enabling faster, cheaper access to the Internet from most new mobile devices.

Tags: accuracast, search, news