The Yahoo! connection

Yahoo! launched its oneSearch service in 2007 as a simplified search engine for mobile devices.

Mitch Lazar (pictured), its Connected Life managing director, has since been involved in the launch of a flurry of new search initiatives to the mobile market, as Yahoo! seeks to establish itself as the leading search brand in mobile and avoid the kind of usurpation it experienced at the hands of rival Google in the internet search engine wars earlier this decade.

According to measures by US researcher comScore and UK analyst Hitwise, Yahoo! owns roughly 22 per cent of the US internet search engine market and a paltry five per cent of UK market share, compared with Google, which takes closer 60 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. It should be noted, these were the statistics aptly available from cursory web searches, and date from 2008.

Also, they do not relate to the mobile web either, for which there appear to be no ready, independent and accurate market share statistics – recent data from Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay into the US market suggests Yahoo! takes 30 per cent of the mobile web, compared with Google’s 60 per cent, but this appears to be a guesstimate based on a variety of other measures.

Yahoo! itself claims 80 per cent of UK mobile internet searches, but its own calculation is based upon its representation on operator portals.

Yahoo!’s strategy is to pay network operators to run as the default search engine on their mobile phones.

In the UK, its Yahoo! Go and oneSearch services come as standard on O2, Orange, T-Mobile, 3 and Virgin Mobile.

“We started to do deals that ensured Yahoo! services, in particular Yahoo! Go and Search, were integrated and embedded into devices so that when they shipped it, they would open a box and have a Yahoo! experience from the outset,” recalls Lazar, of Yahoo’s original action plan.

Yahoo!’s share of UK operator real estate, then, is significant and, one must presume from these claims, market-leading. Lazar reckons the progress it is making in the mobile space is one of the “shining spots within the entire Yahoo! business”.

And yet Bernstein’s estimates and Google’s near-total brand dominance in the broader UK search engine market (as well as a straw poll of internet habits) tells us it is not as clear cut as that.

Indeed, Google’s strategy in mobile, described as ‘pull-through’, is to rely upon its brand and familiarity to succeed outside of network portals. Another straw poll suggests its mobile strategy is good enough.

But Lazar, who succeeded Truphone-bound Geraldine Wilson in October last year, is in positive mood, and considers Yahoo!’s energetic focus on search engine usability and innovative new services will see it ingratiate itself with both Yahoo!-loyalists and longtime Google obsessives in the mobile space – especially as penetration of the mobile internet expands into less discerning demographics.

The thinking behind oneSearch is to provide a search service that is tailored specifically to mobile users, which shrinks information from a range of sources for contextual relevance to web users on the move; something Google is not really doing outside of its nascent Android OS.

OneSearch has been signed by 70 operators so far across the globe, and Lazar is focussing on proliferating it further in Western European markets.

After launch of Yahoo!’s “game-changing” oneSearch project, the company looked to go further still with its mobile service provision, and attempt to fast-track mobile as an advertising media.

“In the same way we did oneSearch, we wanted to be number one on mobile advertising,” explains Lazar. “So we put together a deal with Vodafone, the first of its kind where a business like Yahoo! was serving and selling advertising for an operator.

“Advertisers and agencies tell us we create a one-stop-shop for them to create the easiest buying opportunity that there is in the mobile market and with a network that we represent on display and search, we can offer that. We want to ensure that we round that out in the UK to the best of our ability.”

The deal with Vodafone UK is up in June and will not be renewed on an exclusive basis. But Yahoo! also represents exclusive display inventory (and search inventory) for T-Mobile, 3 and Virgin Mobile. Lazar claims it owns 95 per cent of UK operator “mobile advertising inventory”, with or without exclusives.

The objective for the year ahead, clearly, is for Lazar to fill in the gaps in search and advertising inventory on UK operator portals.

He says: “We need to extend the relationships that we have, especially in the cases where we don’t represent operators on both sides; it’s about growing that piece.”

Full article in Mobile News issue 440 (June 1, 2009).

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