Yahoo! launches mobile search

Yahoo! is set to launch a new mobile search feature today, designed to let users send short text message queries to Yahoo! and receive results back on their mobile phones.

The new SMS Search feature promises to let people get specific information in text on their mobile phones, such as weather, stock quotes and store addresses, and use shortcuts on the keypad to make it faster. For example, typing in "w" and the ZIP code will retrieve a short weather forecast, Yahoo! said.

If a specific listing is not included in the first set of results, users can reply for more and get additional results. Users also can save the responses and reply to them repeatedly thereafter to receive updates on the same information, such as stock quotes for a particular company on a daily basis.

In addition, Yahoo! is set to extend its mobile phone web search function to a broader set of phones. Previously, only PDAs with bigger screens and full web search capability, such as the Treo or BlackBerry, could do browser-based searching.

Now any WAP-enabled phone, which includes most mobile phones with a colour screen, can do web searches. Yahoo! is using Transcoding to translate web pages into a format that a small screen device can display, Yahoo! said.

Yahoo! has partnerships with Cingular, Sprint and Verizon for SMS-based search services and Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile for browser-based web search services.

Yahoo! has also expanded the type of text-based data web searchers can send to a mobile phone to include products, prices and other shopping-related results gleaned during a computer-based web search. Yahoo! previously allowed people to send localised information on petrol stations and other stores and driving directions from web maps as text messages to mobile phones. It added the shopping results function last week.

Yahoo! is not charging consumers for the services but said there may be charges depending on the carrier fees.

Yahoo! has a deal with Sprint to allow PCS Vision customers to send and receive emails, files and photos from their mobile phones.

Google and Yahoo! are in a heated battle to be the first place people go to for information on the internet. They have turned their attention to mobile phones and other non-PC devices and are racing to offer localised content and search to make getting web-based information as easy on handheld devices as it is on a laptop or PC.

Google SMS also offers text-only message results to mobile phones.

Elinor Mills writes for CNET News.com