O2 and Telefonica Say Yahoo to Another Mobile Search Engine

O2, along with it’s parent company, Telefonica, has paired up with Yahoo to provide customers with a way to access Yahoo’s Onesearch search engine through O2’s mobile portal. With Telefonica covering 15 countries between Europe and Latin America alike (with a possible 100 million customers) it’s no stretch to say this is a huge move for the pair.

Yahoo has revamped Onesearch so it takes the mobile user straight to the first site on the menu so they don’t have to filter through pages of material to find the site they’re looking for. With Onesearch customers can access, among other things, news, financial information, weather conditions and Flickr photos.

O2 hope that this move will help the company evolve from purely being a network provider to being a multimedia operation. Having said that, just because O2 have signed with Yahoo this week, it doesn’t mean that next week they won’t be flirting with another search engine.

And, as Bena Roberts, chief analyst with mobile search specialist, BKI Media told The Inquirer, it was only last week that O2 signed with search engine Jumptap.

"All the operators are playing happy friends with all the search engines," Roberts suggested. "Just because they’ve signed with Yahoo that doesn’t mean they won’t have Google in six months time."