Yahoo! Unveils New SMS Based Service

Expanding its operations and presence in the India mobile market, Yahoo! India, today, unveiled its latest mobile-based service – oneSearch.

This new service looks to SMS as a means for mobile subscribers in India to search for information anytime with the help of their mobile phones. This new service is designed to provide consumers better results and instant answers at the normal premium SMS rates (varies from operator to operator).

The new service works on the short-code system and allows you to search for almost any content through Yahoo!'s 58242 short code. For example:

•SMS to 58242 with the city name (e.g. Mumbai) returns back the weather
•SMS to 58242 with the company name (e.g. Infosys) returns back the stock quote

Pranesh Anthapur, Chief Administrative Officer, Yahoo! India said, "India is one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in Asia. Yahoo! is committed to providing Indian consumers easy-to-use mobile products and services to help them access the Internet."

"By providing mobile consumers with instant answers for any search query sent via SMS, we are drastically improving the mobile search experience and will now expand our reach to almost all mobile users in the country." added Manish Dalal, Senior Director, Mobile Products, Yahoo! India.

This service apart from SMS also offers its existing oneSearch WAP product by introducing new content clusters including local business listings, flight status information and Yahoo! Answers content. This is in addition to other content clusters like web results, mobile web results, weather, news, finance, web images, and Flickr photos.

On being asked if Yahoo! Plans to introduce saved and personalized searches, we were told that this is an oft-requested feature and though it’s not available now, it is in the works and would definitely be unveiled in the future.