With the lucrative mobile search market beckoning, InfoSpace and Fast Search & Transfer announced Tuesday a partnership aimed at delivering advanced search-oriented services to carriers.

"In five years more people will be searching from mobile phones than from PCs," said Brendon Benzing, InfoSpace VP of product management, in an interview. "It's still not a mass market and it's too expensive. But the move to 3G will result in a proliferation of content and opportunity."

The combined effort will be aimed initially at providing white-label applications that service providers can offer to their mobile phone subscribers. InfoSpace and Fast break these down into four categories: search, messaging, portal features, and storefronts offering ring tones, wallpaper, and other items.

Benzing noted that market research studies have predicted mobile content driven by search and discovery will be worth about $26 billion by 2011; Nokia has said 60% of cell phone content will be user driven in the same year.

Michael Brady, Fast's senior director of business development, said his firm would supply search software, relevancy algorithms, crawling, and indexing technologies as part of the joint effort. InfoSpace will focus primarily on its experience in mobile infrastructure, metasearch, carrier integration, and customer-oriented service.

"Search has been extremely successful as an online monetization tool," said Brady. "We'll collaborate on developing WAP index functionality. Already, more than 30 million WAP pages have been indexed."

The firms, which announced the partnership at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, said the joint service is being offered initially in North America and Europe.