Major UK Mobile Companies Look To Start Mobile Search Engine

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google from the Sunday Telegraph reports that UK mobile operators and one American mobile operator are looking to build out a mobile search engine that will compete with Google and Yahoo.

The European companies include names such as Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia as well as Cingular in the US. All are apparently planning to meet secretly to explore options to cut Google and Yahoo out of the mobile search ad revenues.

The rational is that these carriers are making less on minutes, due to competition and that mobile search ads look like an attractive way to earn supplemental revenue for the mobile companies.

Google and Yahoo have already made partnerships with many of these companies, but the story reports that the “mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service.”