Yahoo India versus Google India battle goes mobile

Is Yahoo stealing the thunder from Google in India it has gone bullish on mobile in India and has been trying to cater to vast range of regional audiences in India.

Now Yahoo has announced a tie up with Idea Cellular(India's 5th largest telecom operator)along with 5 other Asian operators for its one search on mobile.This comes on the heel of Windows Live's large scale campaign with Hutch(India's 4th largest operator) offering live search on hutch mobiles.

Yahoo! oneSearch is available in 14 countries across the world to use it users are only required to open their mobile phone's browser and type in in.m.yahoo.com.

India is big on web usage through mobile with every 11th person logging on to the web across the world through mobiles turning out to be an Indian.It is fourth largest market in term of web usage through Mobile at 9 percent of total population after UK 27 percent,US 21 percent and South africa 11 percent.

Yahoo is already india's biggest portal and is pretty bullish on India it has launched its yahoo answers service in india which is a big hit ( It claims to attract 12% of its online visitors).Yahoo had used this service in Brazil to let Renault ask its users kind of features consumers would want in a car that the company was planning to launch thus bringing new form of advertising using this feature which it hopes to replicate in India.It has also launched Yahoo India Maps and Our city feature in beat for india,in addition to launching new services, Yahoo has focused on the India's regional languages market. In February,Yahoo launched portals in seven Indian languages, as well as releasing local language plug-ins for its instant messenger service. And later this year, it plans to introduce local language plug-ins for its e-mail service as well More on it here

Google is not completely behind in this race it has put Gmail on mobile in India (http://m.gmail.com) has tied up with Bharti for its search services on Mobile and is testing Mobile ads in India.Google also has many plans for India as reported in my previous post but Yahoo seems more proactive in India.