Yahoo is living up to claims it's going about business as usual, despite the uncertainty of Microsoft's controversial buyout offer. At this week's big CTIA Wireless show, Yahoo announced version 2.0 of its oneSearch mobile search service and enhancements designed to improve search on mobile devices.

The stakes in the burgeoning mobile market are huge. For example, mobile advertising revenue was $347 million in the U.S. in 2007, according to IDC estimates. But the research firm forecast that total could grow to $4 billion by 2011 and there is not yet a dominant player as Yahoo rival Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is in desktop search.

The iPhone changed a lot of people's view of mobile devices once they saw you can truly access the Internet on your phone," Joy Ghaneker, product manager for Yahoo oneSearch, told InternetNews.com. "Now we want to be a catalyst to enable hundreds of millions of users to see what can be done on a mobile device."

Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) launched oneSearch last year as a tailored search service for the screen and user interface limitations of mobile devices. In the year since its launch, Yahoo has signed 29 partnerships with carriers across the globe, covering more than 600 million consumers under contract, according to Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Connected Life at Yahoo, in an address at CTIA. "With Yahoo oneSearch 2.0, we are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones," he said.

The oneSearch technology is designed for a range of mobile devices including the iPhone. The oneSearch Search Assist feature is in fact, only currently available for the iPhone, with support for other devices to come in the next few months.

Search Assist provides real time help with queries offering suggested words and phrases as you begin to type to save time. Yahoo gives the example of typing in the letters H I L and Search Assistant will automatically suggest such completions as Hillary Clinton, Perez Hilton, Hilary Duff, etc., which can be selected to complete the search query.

But Yahoo is also moving to make mobile search easier than typing anything at all via speech recognition technology from a partnership with a company called vlingo. One example: get the latest college tournament basketball results with the simple voice query, "N-C-Double-A."

Ghaneker said the voice-enabled features are available now for certain BlackBerry models with support for other devices coming soon. "Text input is painful and cumbersome," said Ghaneker. He noted that voice recognition has been around for a long time and "always seems one year away from being mainstream." But vlingo's approach is fundamentally different because it gets smarter the more you use it and it's not bounded by specific grammar rules.

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Later this spring, Yahoo also plans to deliver an "idle screen search" feature for mobile phones. With idle screen search, the search box is available with one click so users can enter a search query using either text or speech input without first launching a browser.

Ghaneker said Yahoo thinks the idle search feature will prove useful on a lot of phones where it's difficult to first load a browser and find the search entry box. "Now search is positioned front and center," he said.

Earlier this year, Yahoo released Go 3.0, the latest version of its mobile portal. The Go portal is at the heart of Yahoo's vision for becoming the centerpiece of what it calls the "mobile ecosystem." The graphically rich design features a carousel at the bottom, where users can easily flip through many of the same applications that are found on Yahoo's Web site: mail, weather, news, Flickr and others.