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Vodafone and Orange make overtures for WAP search
Google-alike sponsored search coming to a phone near you

By Reuters

Published: Wednesday 31 March 2004

UK mobile phones will soon sport advertiser-sponsored search engine links after two major players struck a deal with internet search specialist Overture Services.

Vodafone and France Telecom-owned Orange will begin displaying the ads later this spring on their WAP portals Vodafone live! and Orange World, Overture said on Tuesday.

Overture, owned by Yahoo!, started the practice of selling ordinary-looking web page links at the top of search engine query lists. Advertisers bid for popular search terms such as "digital camera'' or "travel'' with the highest bidder getting the most prominent position atop the list.

Selling ads in this way has driven the recovery of online advertising and has triggered a pitched battle among some of the largest internet companies including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN.

The push is now to bring such services to the hundreds of millions of internet-enabled gadgets and mobile phones.

At launch, Overture will sell WAP page ads on the mobile operators' travel portals. A mobile phone user searching for "airfare" can navigate with a few key taps to an advertisers' specially designed WAP page and make a purchase by tapping a "call this number'' link.

Overture announced one such advertiser as online travel agent Lastminute.com.

Martin Child, managing director of Overture's northern Europe unit, said: "Initially, we will deploy our... commercial search model on text and location-based services, gradually moving on to more sophisticated applications allowing easy migration to 3G mobile technology.''

Overture plans to add more operators and more territories in the coming months by working with British technology firm Mobile Commerce.