Portals eyeing mobile tie-ups for maximum hits

NEW DELHI: Global search portals are involved in a slugfest to grab a pie of the world’s fastest growing mobile market that is adding over seven million new users every month. Yahoo!, which lost the race for the big two, after Google forged an exclusive tie-up with Bharti Airtel and Microsoft’s MSN entered into a similar partnership with Vodafone, has now pulled off a coup by signing ‘strategic’ deals with three telcos simultaneously.

Yahoo!, whose India presence was so far limited to a tie-up with Idea Cellular, has snapped up state-owned BSNL, BPL Mobile and Aircel, and now has a target audience of 60 million subscribers.

The race for tapping the cellphone market is best explained if the numbers are considered. “We have about half-a-million subscribers using the search facility daily. The response to the search offering has been particularly good. Most of the searches are centred on information, entertainment, directions and music,” explains Bharti Airtel’s president for mobile services Sanjay Kapoor.

The business model is such that the search engine gets to incorporate advertising along with search responses, much like the sponsored links on the PC. So, with the tie-up with Airtel, Google advertisers can reach about 15 million potential customers per month on a cost-per-click basis.

With mobile phone users outnumbering PC-users in India by a factor of almost seven, it’s expected that the first computing experience for many Indians will be on their mobile phones. With these tie-ups with telcos, the search giants are offering more than mere ‘search’.

For instance, customers of BSNL, Idea, BPL mobile and Aircel who use Yahoo’s ‘OneSearch’ find that the search tool integrates content from a variety of sources, including news, financial information, weather conditions, Flickr photos, Yahoo! Answers, movies, flight status, Wikipedia, currency converters, among others.

And the battle does not end here. Google and Yahoo! have also launched operator-independent SMS-based search services. While Yahoo’s SMS- based service requires the users to have Internet-enabled phones, which make up about 40-45 per cent of India’s handset market, Google SMS allows even phones without GPRS to search information on info from movies playing at the local theatre and places to eat to weather, calculator, currency conversion and dictionary.

“With millions of new subscribers being added every month, it’s a great medium to reach the consumers and get them information when and where they need it,” said Vinay Goel, Head of Products, Google India. It’s a market that leading Indian portal Indiatimes is also planning to tap. “Only 4-5 per cent of mobile phone users are active GPRS users. We are working on offering users information on places to eat, ATMs, hospitals, movie listings and others through our 58888 SMS service which won’t require an Internet-enabled phone,” said an Indiatimes spokesperson.