Tailored to the mobile screen, oneSearch aims to reduce the number of clicks consumers have to make to find information. Entering a simple query such as a team name will bring up the score of its latest game along with a team schedule, photos and related articles so users don’t have to jump around to different sites.

The new application also includes features to help streamline search such as the ability to remember previous queries and auto-fill technology to speed up entry of common terms. To boost distribution, Yahoo also announced that the latest mobile version of Yahoo Go will be included in various devices made by Motorola, Nokia and Samsung Electronics and Research in Motion.

Source: MediaPost

In the past, advertisers were allowed to bid on competitors’ keywords if their site provided detailed information comparing the trademarked item to its own, in order to help consumers make a decision. Yahoo! this week began notifying advertisers that had previously bid on trademarked keywords, explaining in an e-mail that the policy would change on March 1.

Source:  ClickZ

While the deal gives AOL a renewed focus and valuation few would have deemed probable, the New York Times reports that Google’s intention is to leverage the deal into an expansion of its advertising products. 

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said, “We have not offered a complete advertising solution until this point.  This is about expanding the network of our revenue and partners and advertisers, and we couldn’t do that by ourselves.”

AOL will be able to sell both Google’s traditional search advertising and new graphical display advertising.  The advertising may be placed both on Google’s own web site and the many sites on which Google places ads.

The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content. And while creators are likely to sell slightly more content as a result of the increased ease of salability, they will not likely emerge from the obscurity of the Tail merely because they are made available for sale on Amazon or iTunes.

The author argues that aggregation must be combined with filtering in order to “help consumers fully appreciate and navigate the breadth of the content they have to offer. ”

While the search engine in the purest form of filter, its generalized nature means that its effectiveness is reduced as content becomes increasingly “obscure”.  Hence, the rise of industry specific vertical search engines and various user driven collaborative filtering efforts.

Google has partnered with Apple Computer’s iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic and Amazon.com at launch.  Mayer indicated that Google was not interested in develop a service which would compete with online music services:

“We aren’t building out a music store, we are getting people to the iTunes store.  This has been one of the longstanding unfilled user needs, we saw a search need where we weren’t providing users with the highest-quality results that we could.”

While iTunes affiliates earn up to 5% commission on Google has currently has no financial relationship with Apple according to Search Engine Watch:

Google has no financial relationship with the sellers of music. Placement in search results is determined by a combination of the retailer’s page rank and other relevance factors, as well as an element of “randomness” to ensure “fairness,” according to Mayer.

An interesting development which points to the increasing focus on localized and vertical search.  Taken together with Amazon.com’s announcement yesterday, it points to the likelihood that much more highly focused search engines or services will be developed and marketed in the future.

The company has created a photo search engine to demonstrate the service’s potential including the ability to search metadata such as Camera manufacturer and model used to take the photograph.  This type of metadata is usually hidden from standard keyword searches.

Wired.com reports that Bruce Gilliat, Alexa’s CEO predicted that:

From computer scientists to web hobbyists,  Alexa’s inexpensive services will spawn numerous creative results. Costs are priced at $1 per transaction, which range from a CPU hour of computing time to gigabytes of uploads and downloads. Gilliat said a complete web snapshot should cost a “couple thousand” dollars.

An interesting development which may have a significant impact on the search industry.  We are experimenting with the service at the moment.