The major bottleneck faced by mobile search service providers will be enabling users to look for what they want on the Internet via handsets rather than confined searching within the telecom operators' WAP portals, said iResearch, a Shanghai-based information technology consulting firm.

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"The upcoming third-generation era in China will accelerate the application of mobile search, apart from other content-rich services like video," said iResearch in the report.

Wireless search took off in China last year as user numbers soared 230 percent. The number this year is expected to leap another 109 percent year on year to 71 million, and reach 127 million in 2008, iResearch estimated.

And competition in the sector between online search engines for a solid foothold has already begun.

Last month, Google Inc announced a partnership with China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier by user number, to provide search services for its 300 million subscribers. The search, however, would be confined within China Mobile's WAP portals for items such as ring tones and pictures.

Meanwhile, the most popular Chinese search engine Baidu.com is also rumored to be in talks with China Unicom, the nation's second-largest mobile operator. Baidu already launched a search engine service for several of Nokia's handset models last year, with four popular services - Web search, news search, image search and Baidu post bar.

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