So on Monday I mentioned that a mobile search company was about to launch a mobile game search service. It’s now formally official, the company in question is abphone, a mobile content search engine based in France.

abphone may have a low profile but it’s currently a very popular off-portal mobile content search engine, users can easily find and images or videos, and download them for free on their mobile phone.

In April 2008, abphone said that is reached half billion searches.

Today, abphone adds a new vertical: mobile games. For this beta launch, the mobile search company has partnered with Gameloft to index its entire catalog of premium games (about 200) and make it accessible via a search box.

This is the first mobile search engine that allows people to find cell phone games.

abphone has also indexed free mobile games from Greystripe.

The service is only available in France so far, but more countries will be added in the near future as well as more mobile game providers’ catalogs (paid and free ones).

Like other mobile content search engines, the indexing of games is made via XML feeds. Rankings are based on relevance, but also on some factors such as ratings or popularity.

Below is a demonstration of the user interface.

Premium games are displayed on top of the search result pages.

A link to the free games (“jeux gratuits” in french) search results page is displayed at the bottom.

A content page, with information such as user ratings, comments and number of downloads.

abphone is available at this address from a mobile device: http://m.abphone.com