While Apple’s iPhone was the week’s main attraction, CES also saw some game-changing announcements that will likely take mobile search to a new and necessary level. Last year was so Web search; this year the industry understands that retrofitting Web search engines for the mobile Internet is an ill-conceived approach. Users won’t wade through a mixed bag of results based on a few key words - and the limited input capabilities of mobile devices such as screen size and small, tedious keypads only exacerbate the problem. In a nutshell, users want genuinely useful results. Enter relevancy – a term that made its debut at CES and is sure to remain the mobile search mantra of 2007.

Indeed, relevancy runs like a leitmotiv through Yahoo’s new product offer and its future roadmap. (Staci has an exclusive interview with Yahoo here.)Its oneSearch search engine picks up on users’ intent, intuits the information they want and then presents the relevant content, grouped by subject, in synopsis form. A sports search on oneSearch, for example, will return a relevant bundle of scores from a team’s most recent game, along with game schedules, team rosters, photos, local results, and so on, Yahoo said. Improving relevancy was also at the center of Medio’s recent deal with T-Mobile. In this case, however, Medio goes a step further and adds recommendation technology to the mix, allowing T-Mobile to proactively suggest similar content to users based on an analysis of their content preferences and intent.

Likewise, JumpTap has told me it will introduce technologies and techniques to personalize search results and recommend relevant content. InfoSpace has come out of stealth mode and confided to me it is gearing up to launch a “carrier-focused client software-based scheme that can follow the clues users leave on their phone to deliver a more relevant and more comprehensive” mobile search experience. (Delivering more relevant results is also at the top of Google’s agenda – so look for some product launches soon that will do much more than lip service to personalized search.) In a word: Relevancy rules! To be fair, the jury is out on what constitutes a set of relevant search results, but the race is on in mobile to deliver the right content to the right users.