Marissa Mayer working to get Apple to dump Google, default to Yahoo for mobile search

“Wall Street gave Yahoo stock a big boost today — largely due to the stellar quarterly performance of China’s Alibaba, in which the Silicon Valley Internet giant has a big stake,” Kara Swisher reports for Re/code.

“While a lot of the chatter about Yahoo’s latest financials seems focused on increasing display advertising sales — which went up two percent in Yahoo’s first quarter — sources inside the company say the big focus for truly turbocharging revenue will be an aggressive effort being led by CEO Marissa Mayer and Adam Cahan, its SVP of mobile and emerging products, around search,” Swisher reports. “And, according to sources, the lodestone of two internal projects aimed at building a viable mobile search engine and monetization platform is to convince Apple to make Yahoo the default search engine on its Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad.”

“A number of Yahoo insiders I have talked to said her plan to pitch Apple on the idea as its marquee mobile search partner is far along. The company has prepared detailed decks, including images of what such a search product would look like, and hopes to present them to Apple execs,” Swisher reports. “That has not happened as yet officially and no deal is imminent — it’s just the big honking goal of the new Yahoo effort, said sources. Still, several said Mayer has already buttonholed a few Apple executives on the topic, including its powerful SVP of design, Jony Ive, who knows the former Google exec well.”

“In a piece titled ‘The Google-Free iPhone,’ my BFF M.G. Siegler pointed out the obvious: ‘Apple is directly responsible for billions of dollars being sent Google’s way via search on its devices. This will only continue to increase. It’s believed that Google makes more money off of iOS devices through search than they do through Android devices. In other words, Apple is indirectly subsidizing a portion of the major war against itself. Yep,” Swisher reports. “Yep. That thought has clearly occurred to Mayer.”

Tons more – click through for all the details – in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Hey, if you really want to wage thermonuclear war, you have to actually detonate a nuke here and there, you know?

Something impactful like this sure beats watching a bunch of lawyers dick around in courtrooms around the world for years to no great avail.

Leave Google as a non-default option in iOS Safari and that’ll avoid any blowback as experienced with the Apple Maps debacle (which itself could have been avoided with a simple “beta” label).

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” and “Bill” for the heads up.]