Yahoo expands its mobile search functions

Yahoo has launched a new mobile search feature designed to let people send short text message queries and receive results via their mobile phones.

The new feature, called SMS Search, is designed to let people get specific information, such as weather, stock quotes and business addresses, and use shortcuts on the keypad to make it faster. For example, typing in "w" and the ZIP code will retrieve a short weather forecast.

If the information sought is not included in the first set of results, users can request and receive additional input. People also can save the responses and reply to them repeatedly over time to get updates of the same information, such as stock quotes for a particular company.

In addition, Yahoo is set to extend its browser-based mobile search function to a broader set of devices. Previously, only PDAs with bigger screens and full Web search capability, such as the Treo and the BlackBerry, could do browser-based searching.