Turkey’s third largest operator, Avea, has announced the launch of content search services powered by Mobile Content Network’s (MCN’s) ‘federated search’ technology. Avea will also launch MCN’s allwords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising solution.

MCN have a completely different approach to search from all other search companies, something we’ve written about a number of times. It is a ‘federated search’ search approah rather than being based on webcrawling spiders. Read this explanation of how Federated search works, and this interview with Marc Bookman, CEO of MCN.

With allwords(sm) content providers buy all of the keywords in a category (music, games, books, videos, shopping, etc) with a single purchase. This dramatically simplifies budgeting and management and enables them to focus on packaging, promotion, optimizing their metadata to return higher value results—all the things that they do well.

Avea is a rapidly growing mobile operator with 11 million subscribers, about 17% of the Turkish market. They run the very popular youth oriented mobile social network called Patlican (see below). Avea also launched Turkey’s first video ringtone service recently in partnership with Vringo.

“Avea carefully evaluated a number of search solutions for our WAP Portal (wap.avea.com.tr) and we’ve selected the MCN MobileSearch.net platform because it provides great, real-time results from local content sources, easy expansion of new categories and content sources, and the widest range of revenue sources for Avea,” said Mr.İlker Kocak, Chief Marketing Officer of Avea. “This new offering will benefit our subscribers and is a win-win for Turkey’s mobile content ecosystem.”

2008 has been a great year of growth for MCN, as they’ve tripled their Distribution Partnerships. In addition to original customers in Japan, MCN now has partnerships with Tele2, Elisa, all 3 Operators in Thailand, Nokia WidSets, Mygamma/BuzzCity in Thailand, Smart Communications (#1 in Philippines), Avea. With this growth they are expecting to reach 300 million users by the end of the year!

Read the full press release.