The team behind the Opera browser has dealt a blow to Yahoo this week with the announcement that it is ditching the search engine's services for its mobile browser in favour of Google.

The news means anyone using the Opera mobile web browser or Opera Mini browser will automatically get Google as the default search engine from the start of next month.

The company says that every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages, with much of that traffic generated through the search function in the browser perhaps suggesting that Yahoo's results just weren't up to the job.

But its probably not as big a shock as you might imagine. Google has been the default search option on the company's desktop browser for 7 years.

Google will appear as the default search engine for new and current users of Opera Mini as of 1 March 2008.