“There’s a lot of money and mindshare to be had by taking the default search position on mobile devices, especially Apple’s,” Lee Hutchinson reports for Ars Technica.
“Google allegedly pulls in much more revenue from search on iOS than it does on Android, and Mayer’s Yahoo appears to regard a return to prominence in search as a key to the company’s long-term success,” Hutchinson reports. “There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, though. Yahoo currently relies on Microsoft’s Bing for search results as part of a long-term partnership deal with Microsoft; the company has no actual search product of its own.”
“Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land correctly points out that it’s been a long time since Yahoo provided its own search results, and the company would need to start from scratch with infrastructure, personnel, and an algorithm in order to actually do search again,” Hutchinson reports. “Just reserving Bing results wouldn’t work—if Apple wanted Bing search results on iOS, it would be better off skipping the middle man and going to Microsoft directly.”
Read more in the full article here.