Mobile Giants Plot Secret Rival to Google
The Telegraph is reporting that Europe’s biggest telecoms groups are aiming to create a mobile phone search engine that could challenge Yahoo! and Google, the US giants.
"…mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service."
If this comes to fruition I suspect the implementation will fall far short of anything Google produce. Political infighting within and between the various companies as to what should be put in the search engine as well as access protection concerns are likely to produce a sub-optimal solution… and this is before you actually consider how hard it is to create and maintain a search engine accessible by millions of people.
Nevertheless, it’s interesting that Europe’s biggest telecoms groups consider mobile search to be a big enough issue to be considering new solutions.
Coincidentally, this Monday’s London Mobile Monday is themed ‘Mobile Search’. I’ll be there if anyone wants to meet up.