Yahoo and Virgin Mobile jointly announced that Yahoo will now become the sole mobile search provider for the British mobile phone operator's four million subscribers.

Yahoo now has about 80 percent of the British search market, up from around 76 percent.  Virgin subscribers will have access to the Yahoo oneSearch platform starting on Monday, December 8.

Although exact details of the working partnership haven't been released, Yahoo's mobile platform, called oneSearch, has been designed so it returns search results directly to the first screen instead of listing links like a regular search engine.

Yahoo and Virgin will share revenue, ringtones, wallpapers and other similar phone features can be downloaded or clicked on.

Virgin also introduced a new 30 pence per day mobile Internet tax that will have "unlimited access" of up to 25MB per day to apply.  Customers who exceed 25MB per day will have to pay £2 each MB they go over.

The struggling Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company remains locked in a battle with Google and Microsoft, as the trio of companies compete in the PC and mobile search markets.  Google now dominates the PC search market, and Yahoo has been working diligently to try and pick up mobile search partners.

Its main strategy involves providing mobile Internet users access to services and search information without owning the services that it links users to.  ComScore research shows 60 percent of 17.6 million mobile Web users in September used Google, while 36 percent chose to use Yahoo.

In the United States, Yahoo is now working with T-Mobile and AT&T, which gives Yahoo a possible user base of 105 million subscribers between the two companies.

Yahoo has 70 working partnerships spread across the world, with access to 850 million phone subscribers.  The company will now shift its focus on several vital European markets, with France, Italy, Germany and Spain the leading candidates.