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Search Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The search wars are heating up again, and this time, the battlefield is mobile, with Microsoft becoming the official, default search engine for the Verizon, the United States’ largest wireless provider. The real winners of the spoils of war, however, might be the telecoms themselves, at least in the short run.

In the Verizon deal, for example, the wireless operator picked up around $600 million after Microsoft outspent Google to become the carrier’s default mobile search provider. Back in 2001, Sprint chose Google as its official search partner, while T-Mobile has sided with Yahoo! in an ad revenue sharing deal, as has AT&T.

And what do these pricey contracts buy the search providers? They typically become the default search engine on all, or most, of that service provider’s handsets, but users are still free to switch to another search engine. In fact, while T-Mobile’s deal with Yahoo! covers a variety of Yahoo! services, the fourth-place telecom’s flagship device is the G-1, running Google’s Android operating system and closely linked in with that company’s services.

And while mobile search is relatively small potatoes today, increasingly sophisticated phones — and the data plans they’re tied to, might propel the mobile search advertising market to balloon to billions in revenues over the next several years.