I was skeptical about the scoop Nadir Garouche reported on his blog late last week. But if we consider that Nadir is a leading exec at a major mobile content publisher, a respected voice in the emerging field of mobile SEO (in fact, he is speaking at the November 21 Mobile SEO Thought Leadership Workshop organized by IIR Ltd. and sponsored by MSG), and a well-known blogger with his finger on the industry pulse, then you can’t dismiss the news that T-Mobile has chosen Yahoo oneSearch as the default search engine for its handsets (except the G1 and the Sidekick) as just another rumor.

I caught up with Nadir after I returned from my whirlwind line-up of meetings and briefings in London last week, to get the inside track on where Nadir got his information and what we can expect. In a nutshell: Nadir’s source is a high placed exec in his own company. Yahoo contacted the publisher with the news so the company could gear up for the launch and move forward buying sponsored links on search results and bidding for a top-notch spot in paid search results.

What is the likely impact on Medio, T-Mobile on-portal mobile search provider? I have an email out asking for comment. It’s Columbus Day, so I don’t expect an immediate response.

We know what this customer win means for Yahoo (another key client and another channel to deliver search results and search advertising), and we can imagine that one-button access to Yahoo mobile search will go a long way toward educating the consumer about mobile search.

What is the impact on content publishers? The jury is out, but Nadir is particularly upbeat. As he points out, Yahoo oneSearch will allow T-Mobile USA customers to search for a mix of on- and off-portal content. As Nadir puts it: “Mobile publishers should notice more traffic on their sites.” T-Mobile has over 30 million subscribers, and any search scheme that can expose that content through a single search box at the top of the operator homepage is good news.

My take: Branded or not, the real issue is mobile search usability. It’s all about easy access (translated: a single search box) and quality results.

Ironically, this is precisely the topic Brian Lent, Medio Systems CEO, addressed in this exclusive bnetTV video interview. (Brian also gives us the inside track on uSearch, a single search box solution (not yet formally released) built to expose content “whether it is on-deck, off-deck, on the web or on the handset.” Medio gets it – and Peggy Albright and I look forward to road testing the service as part of our series of mobile search performance reports soon.

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And in case you missed it (I know I did), Nadir’s recent post on Google mobile search reveals a major rehaul of the search giant’s mobile Web index – and good news for content companies and SEOs alike. Nadir and MSG have ranted often about the poor quality and relevancy of Google’s mobile Web search results, and now it appears that Google has made a concentrated effort to improve the experience. As Nadir observes: “Google includes regular PC sites in its Mobile Web index, but these sites actually have mobile versions, so when users click on it from Google Mobile, they’ll be redirected to a mobile friendly page. So if you do SEO for your PC site, and automatically redirect users to the mobile version of your site when they visit it from a mobile phone, you have some good chances of being included in Google’s Mobile Web Index.” The sites that Nadir oversees have achieved better rankings – and it will be interesting to see the development (and the impact) over time.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.