According to the Telegraph a bunch of mobile operators in the UK are getting together to form their own search engine. Only last week I was feeding back to a journalist why the mobile web search experience was so bad, the journalist was trying to blame it on the search engines until I pointed out that in fact it really was the website owners that were to blame, and possibly the mobile operators because of their tarriff structures.

Look at the chart below, it quantifies the % of ''mobile content' made available by websites vs that made available by Googles transcoder. It's a small sample size but illustrates the point pretty clearly:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

keyphrase	Google / Transcoder	Mobile Web	Relative Size of Mobile       Web %
holidays	21,000,000	81,300	0.39
loans	11,700,000	16,100	0.14
property	444,500,000	1,020,000	0.23
restaurants	22,400,000	321,000	1.43
hotels	31,700,000	198,000	0.62
% Specific Mobile Web content:			0.56
% Content made available       on mobile devices by the Transcoder:			99.44

As you will see the the mobile web is approximately 0.56% the size of the normal web content made available by Googles transcoder (the transcoder tries to make websites accessible to mobile devices).   In fact to demonstrate how bad the actual 'mobile web' is, you can check out www.google.co.uk/pda yourself tick 'the mobile web' radio button and search for Nokia, it's truely embarassing. Search for a few other things and see just how spartan the mobile search landscape is.

Considering that there is so little actual mobile web content out there, and the quality of what exists is pretty dire, it seems a little odd that the operators want to create their own engine. Possibly they might be better off just partnering with Google who can help create a better mobile search experience?