With the battle for international search deals intensifying, Google has won a new contract to provide algorightmic search for Eniro, a portal and directory publisher operating in Northern Europe.
Neither the financial terms nor the duration of the contract was disclosed. The deal could lead to additional services including advertising deals, the companies said.
“This is the beginning of a partnership to provide the best search experience to users of Eniro in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland,” said Omid Kordestani, a Google vice president.
For Google, the win occurs in its rival’s backyard. Overture Services gained a strong presence in the region last month when it bought the Web search unit of Oslo-based FAST Search & Transfer’s Web for $100 million last month.
Sweden-based Eniro, which recently expanded through the acquisition of Scandinavia Online, logs more than 600 million searches yearly.
“With our locally produced content, the cooperation with Google means that Eniro’s Internet search service will be the most comprehensive alternative for everyone searching the Web,” said Lars Guldstrand, Enviro’s president and CEO.
For Google, the deal comes two weeks after it signed a deal with South Korea’s Daum Communications to provide algorithmic search services for the portal, Daum.net. In that case, Daum decided to split its search business down the middle, partnering with Overture in a three-year exclusive paid-listings deal two months ago.
Overture and Google have increasingly battled each other abroad, where the paid search market is relatively new. While Overture has beaten back Google to win a number of deals, including agreements with the top ISPs in the United Kingdom and France, another key Asian portal, Yahoo! Japan, decided to split its paid search business between the two companies.
Meanwhile, FAST, which now focuses exclusively on enterprise search, inked a deal with Japanese Internet service provider NTT-X to power multi-media search on its portal, “goo.”
FAST’s technology was chosen because of its support for different languages and the ability to search music and video files, NTT-X said.
