• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 12, 2008

Yahoo this morning said it formed a strategic partnership with T-Mobile International to expand its mobile services to millions of consumers in T-Mobile's European footprint. This agreement bolsters Yahoo oneSearch initiative, making it the exclusive mobile search provider for T-Mobile customers in 11 European markets beginning at the end of March.

The deal follows others struck over the past 13 months, including AT&T in the U.S., giving Yahoo oneSearch coverage on 29 mobile operators serving more than 600 million subscribers worldwide.

In most of the deals, Yahoo was named either the exclusive, or "preferred" mobile search service on the carrier's mobile portal.

Yahoo said it is working on other deals to expand the reach of Yahoo oneSearch, and that it is developing new features that will make the system a simple mobile search platform for consumers, enabling them to implement search queries without having to connect through a PC, or Internet connected device.

Among the new features added in recent months are a mobile "Flight Tracker," movie reviews, access to Wikipedia, and integration with Yahoo Answers.

"When we created Yahoo! oneSearch, we had a belief that mobile search was not the same as PC search," Marco Boerries, execute vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo, stated in the announcement released this morning as part of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "A fundamentally different approach was required, one that included different usage models and results filtering."