Yahoo ups mobile search ante

The next search battleground is your mobile phone.

Yahoo announced Tuesday Yahoo oneSearch (see gallery), a mobile search designed to deliver instant answers that serve relevant information. The service is available on 85 percent of the mobile phones and is available through Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.

The oneSearch launch is designed to up the ante against Google, which also has its mobile search efforts. Mobile search is likely to connect with the local search capabilities, the other front in the ongoing search war. Richard MacManus has a good walkthrough of Yahoo's oneSearch features, Yahoo offers a screencast and there's Techmeme discussion.

What's different about Yahoo's mobile search? Here's what Yahoo describes:

Yahoo! oneSearch is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible for consumers by providing relevant results right on the page such as news headlines, images, business listings and more as well as easy navigation to other websites. For example, if a consumer wants to go to a movie this weekend, they just need to type the name of the movie into the search box. The search results would first list the movie, including a user rating, local theaters the movie is playing at, news headlines related to the movie and more. To dig more deeply into the results, a consumer would simply need to click on any item or category. For example, to see all the movies playing at a specific listed theater, just click on the theater name.

And of course oneSearch offers advertisements built into the search experience.

While Yahoo's effort is an advance it's not the last word by any stretch. Google's mobile search isn't exactly chopped liver--especially when its combined with Google's Map application. Meanwhile, Microsoft's mobile Windows software conveniently includes MSN search. Bottom line: You can expect a real dogfight on the mobile search front.