T-Mobile has announced that it is likely to make Yahoo! oneSearch the exclusive search engine in all eleven of its European markets. The company is the twenty-sixth mobile carrier to sign a major deal with Yahoo! and displaces arch-rival Google as T-Mobile's preferred search engine.

The announcement came at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, and represents a loss for Google of an estimated 90 million-plus mobile users of its search engine.

According to the UK's Guardian newspaper, Hamid Akhavan, T-Mobile's chief executive, said the company decided to go with Yahoo! because its mobile search technology was better than anything offered by Google.

"We have established a partnership with Yahoo that is strategic, this one is more than just working together. We believe we can have a longer and deeper relationship," Akhavan told a reporter. 

The mobile phone company's customers will still be able to access Google on their phones, the UK newspaper reports, but on the first page that users hit when they go on to the web through its Web 'n' Walk' service, Google's search bar will be replaced by Yahoo's from April.

The newspaper finished its report with an interesting observation about Silicon Valley vs. traditional wireless carriers:

"One of the main talking points at the Congress, the industry's largest trade show, has been the threat to the traditional mobile phone companies by online companies and technology firms that want a slice of the mobile internet, such as Microsoft, Google and Nokia."