Today we are announcing a partnership with TIM Brasil, one of the country’s largest carriers, to power the search experience on TIM’s enhanced mobile portal. Our partnership with TIM Brasil builds on our existing relationships with Telefónica’s Vivo and América Móvil’s Claro in Brazil, and more than 100 other OEM and carrier partners globally.

Yahoo! Search will be the exclusive search service for TIM Busca, providing an easier and faster mobile search experience. Check out the Yahoo! Mobile Blog for more information about this partnership.

Melissa Beltrao

Director, Yahoo! Mobile Brazil

We’re introducing the Yahoo! Search Widget for the Android smart phones today, making it much easier to access web search on the Android phone home screen.

The UI is simple and compact to fit the size of your phone screen. Under the covers, we’ve packed in some cool features.

You can type the query using the touch screen or use the voice input to speak your search query. Whether you enter the query by touch screen or voice, you’ll see search suggestions that help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

In the Yahoo! Mobile Search results, you’ll see shortcuts, news and deeper results only a tap away. Try searching for “World Cup” and you’ll get a concise set of the latest scores and news, with deeper results about the games.

While the app is currently only available in the U.S., the voice input package is available in multiple languages.  Look for your country-specific version to roll out soon in your local Android Market.

Try out the Yahoo! Search widget and our other widgets by scanning the barcode below with your Android phone. We’d love to hear what you think.

Anil Panguluri
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! was one of the first companies to revolutionize mobile search. With the launch of oneSearch in 2007, we fundamentally changed mobile search by delivering answers, not just Web links. Today we are introducing two new apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch that once again change the way you search on mobile devices.

We’ve created an app called Yahoo!^® Sketch-a-Search: you simply draw a shape on a map to discover local restaurants around your current location or anywhere you choose in the U.S. We’re also rolling out the new Yahoo! Search app, which embeds maps, localizes query suggestions as you type, and includes intelligent search history and voice search.

Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search app for iPhone and iPod Touch

Yahoo! Search app for iPhone and iPod Touch

Both Sketch-a-Search and the Yahoo! Search app are available at the iTunes store. You can learn more details about Sketch-A-Search and the Yahoo! Search App on the Yahoo! Mobile Blog.

With these new features, you can experience what search can be like without having to use keywords. Instead of a list of links, we get you the answers you need quickly in an easily digestible format, incorporating rich shortcuts, Yahoo! Search Assist, location-based technology, voice search, and more.

In addition to making mobile search easier to use, we are making it available on more phones around the world. We have partnered with more than 80 of the leading mobile carriers and manufacturers like Apple, RIM, AT&T, Nokia, América Móvil, and Telefónica. Yahoo! Search is available across mobile platforms in 43 countries and 18 languages.

We want to make it easier for you to use Yahoo! Search on your mobile phones and find new ways to deliver information that’s important to you. With the fast pace of mobile browser development, this is an exciting time for our industry.  Expect more from us in the future to help you keep up with the news, events, and activities that are happening around you.

Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products

As aid workers in Haiti settle into the anything-but-routine work of helping care for a devastated country, people continue to come to Yahoo! Search to find out how to help victims of the earthquake. Just this week, Haiti-related search spikes turned to “tents for Haiti,” which had 1,000 percent more searches than the previous week. The plight of Haiti’s orphans also continues to be on people’s minds as they search for “Haiti orphan rescue,” which buzzed to over 9,000 percent this week as Haitian orphans were taken in by the U.S. and as a scandal erupted over possible removal of children from Haiti.

Yahoo! Search data also paints an intriguing timeline of the 7.0 earthquake that shook the country on Jan. 12. As news of the quake spread, concerned citizens took to the Yahoo! Search to learn the details and to research how to help.

Right after the news of the quake, people turned to their mobile devices for immediate information. In the first two days after the quake, Yahoo! Mobile searches on “Haiti Earthquake” increased 3,300 percent. Popular search themes centered on photos, relief efforts, Wyclef Jean, and current news almost immediately. Several of the top earthquake queries were in Spanish.  As the week went on, people started looking for more contextual information, wanting Haiti maps, asking “where is Haiti”, and looking for information on Haitian poverty and whether the country is cursed.

In Yahoo! Web search, searches focused more clearly on volunteering and donating aid and time. Users were deeply concerned about the plight of Haitian orphans, offered prayers for Haiti, and researched church-based relief organizations. People were also eager to donate their help via text messaging as we saw searches for “texting to help Haiti,” “text Haiti 90999,” and “text Yele.”

Many searches focused on the names mentioned in news reports about Haiti’s earthquake. Searchers looked for former president François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Port-au-Prince archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, and the head of the U.N. mission in Haiti, Hedi Annabi. Haitian president René Préval also spiked as he appealed for aid.

As the immediate shock subsided, Web searchers expanded their interest, looking for information on the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighboring country that that offered a lot of aid to migrating survivors. People also want to know more about other large earthquakes, notably the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. They also looked up details about fault lines, causes of earthquakes and tsunamis, and the Richter scale for measuring the size of tremblers.

After learning of the quake, teams across Yahoo! stepped up to help with the relief efforts in a wide variety of ways. Yahoo! employees in the U.S. have donated more than $145,000 to the cause, including corporate matches for those donations. Yahoo! users have donated more than $1.5 million to support Haiti relief and rebuilding efforts globally. You can see more of our efforts on behalf of earthquake victims at Yodel Anecdotal. For up-to-date news about the Jan. 12 Haiti Earthquake, please visit http://news.yahoo.com/topics/haiti.

Jessica Hilberman

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! was ranked as the overall top mobile search provider in a recently published benchmarking study from Gomez, Inc. and dotMobi. The study was developed to “compare and rank the mobile Web experience provided by the top businesses in the airline, banking and search industries.” It tested and rated mobile search services across five “critical dimensions of success,” including discoverability, readiness, availability, response time, and consistency.

We thought this would be a good opportunity to call out some of the key features we’ve introduced recently that have enhanced the mobile search experience.

In just the past few months, we have rolled out an auto-locate feature that uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect the user’s location, an enhanced Search Assist that incorporates the user’s recent search history, and a Windows Mobile client. In the two and a half years since we introduced Yahoo! oneSearch, we have sought to continuously innovate and deliver a great mobile search experience for our Yahoo! oneSearch users worldwide. Yahoo! oneSearch powers the search experience on more than 70 of the leading carrier portals around the globe, including most recently, new co-branded oneSearch experiences with Comcel and Movistar in several more Latin American countries.

Check out the results study’s results in this post from Search Engine Land. We always welcome to your feedback on how to improve Yahoo! oneSearch, so please comment below with your thoughts and requests.

Lee Ott
Yahoo! oneSearch

Earlier this month we launched Inquisitor for the iPhone, making mobile search even faster by auto-completing your search and giving suggestions as you type. Now the application is available from the Apple Store for users in these countries:

• Canada
• UK
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Australia
• New Zealand

By default, Inquisitor will provide search results and suggestions from Yahoo!’s U.S. index, but you can choose to search using other countries’ engines by changing the country setting in the Inquisitor options menu. We hope you give the Inquisitor iPhone app a try!

Ariel Seidman & David Watanabe
Yahoo! Search

Today Inquisitor goes mobile for the iPhone, making the application ubiquitous across platforms. Searching on-the-go should be quick and easy – that’s why we focused on making the design of the Inquisitor application simple and seamless so you can get your answers quickly.

Inquisitor Mobile Search auto-completes your search and gives suggestions as you type to refine your search. When you type in your query, websites and suggestions appear immediately below the search box. Inquisitor also speeds up your search by quickly loading site summaries and allowing you to navigate between results and the browser with just one click.

Give the Inquisitor iPhone app a try (download it here at the Apple App store) and let us know what you think.

Ariel Seidman and David Watanabe
Yahoo! Search

The Yahoo! Mobile team works every day to make mobile search faster, easier, and more relevant for millions of Yahoo! oneSearch users worldwide. Today we’re launching several new features for the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut, including an auto-locate feature that uses cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi to detect the user’s location, enhanced Search Assist that incorporates the user’s recent search history, and a Windows Mobile client.

Last August, we launched the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut to provide one-click access to Yahoo! oneSearch, making search easily accessible on mobile devices. With today’s launch, we’re making Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut available on Windows Mobile devices in the U.S. With an integrated voice search you can speak or type your query directly from the home screen of Windows Mobile devices. We’ve also added an auto-locate feature on select devices to deliver local search results based on a combination of cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi hotspots. You no longer need to type in your address or zip code to access local listings – Yahoo! oneSearch can provide results based on your location.

Finally, since we know it can be challenging to type on mobile devices, we’re improving our Search Assist technology on BlackBerry devices by incorporating the user’s search history. This will enable faster and easier input, delivering contextual recommendations and predictive text completion alongside the user’s previously searched terms. Simply type in your query and your recent searches or similar queries will display on the screen as a prompt. For example, while typing “Sus” in San Francisco, you may be offered Sushi Groove if you previously searched for it, or you may see “sushi recipe” as an assisted suggestion.

In this launch, we have also made the Yahoo! oneSearch Shortcut available on some of the latest Nokia, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. It is also now available on select devices in Australia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Click here for additional information on device/country support.

For more information and to download the applications, Nokia and Windows Mobile users can visit our PC site or http://m.yahoo.com/shortcut from their mobile device. BlackBerry users can visit this website or direct their mobile phone browser to http://m.yahoo.com/voice. We hope you will try out these new features and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile

The Yahoo! Mobile team has continued to develop new enhancements to make Yahoo! oneSearch easier and more effective for our users on the go. Today, we’re further enhancing the mobile search experience by rolling out a Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut for Nokia devices. This new shortcut provides users with one-click access to Yahoo! oneSearch through our downloadable client. Once installed, it only takes one click on your phone screen to initiate a search. Simply click on the pencil key or right shortcut key on your device, and you no longer have to hunt through your cell phone menu to conduct a search.

If you have a select Series 60 Nokia device (e.g. N70, N95, N73, 6120, and E65), give it a try. The Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is currently available for you in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. If you don’t have a Series 60 Nokia, we’re hoping to bring the oneSearch shortcut to you soon.

One of the key features of the Yahoo! oneSearch shortcut is the integration of Search Assist, which made its mobile debut in April at CTIA. Mobile Search Assist is powerful on the go when you’re having to type on small keyboards or “triple tap” phone buttons; it reduces the time it takes to enter a search term through real time search suggestions and related concepts for more refined results. For example, as you type in ‘Dark Knight‘, Search Assist may recommend suggestions such as Darth Vader or Olympian Dara Torres to help guide your search.

For more information, visit http://mobile.yahoo.com/onesearch/shortcut on your PC, or http://m.yahoo.com/shortcut on your mobile device. And let us know what you think in the comments below.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile

With March Madness in full effect, the incessant score-checking is already underway. Yahoo! Mobile is making it a little easier to use search to keep up with your favorite teams.

Now that you’ve got your bracket filled out and your old college T-shirt freshly pressed, it’s go time. Will Western Kentucky be this year’s George Mason upset, or will they go the way of past Cinderella hopefuls and get sent packing after the second round? We obviously can’t predict the future, but we can give the men’s college basketball scores on your mobile phone using Yahoo! oneSearch. Simply go to m.yahoo.com on your mobile phone browser and search for ‘ncaa‘ or the name of your college team of choice. You’ll get the top scores per region from all your favorite teams on your mobile phone, so you can stay a step ahead of fellow fans with your quick knowledge of who made an early exit.

And when you’re not in full March Madness mode, the Yahoo! Mobile team has brought another favorite pastime to your mobile phone.

For iPhone users, you can now watch streaming movie trailers directly from oneSearch by going to m.yahoo.com and searching for ‘movies‘ or a movie name. When you click on the movie image in the search results page, you’ll be able to view the movie trailer streamed in QuickTime format and optimized for your iPhone. So if you’re trying to plan out your weekend, or you’re bored on the train, check out the top box office trailers like “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who” or “10,000 B.C.” through oneSearch. Simply click on the movie image and you’ll be directed to the trailer. You can also find showtimes near you and buy tickets for select theaters from the movie menu.

Joy Ghanekar
Yahoo! Mobile