Up until now, TeliaSonera, the largest mobile network operator in Finland and Sweden, was using MotionBridge (acquired my Microsoft in 2006) for their on-portal search service. I’ve heard from an inside source that in the 2 weeks, TeliaSonera will relaunch a brand new search service on their WAP portal in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. TeliaSonera will stop working with Microsoft. Instead they have chosen JumpTap, a white label mobile search engine that has been growing during the last 2 years.

TeliaSonera’s mobile content providers will still be able to index their content with JumpTap, so that users can find them via search keywords, just like MotionBridge/Microsoft. What’s new is the paid search solution offer. Advertisers can now buy sponsored listings from JumpTap to appear in the search results, there will be two ads per page.

TeliaSonera’s WAP portal is also going to be revamped, and the focus will on mobile Internet thanks to a tool called SurfOpen, you can find more information about that on this press release.

This is yet another case where a mobile network company chooses to work with a white label search engine, rather than one of the big 3s. Let’s wait a few months or years to see if this choice proves to be the right one for users, advertisers, and mobile phone companies.