Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer is planning to convince Apple to adopt Yahoo as the default search engine for Safari. According to a report from Re/code, Yahoo is working on two secret projects that will make “a viable mobile search engine and monetization platform to convince Apple to make Yahoo the default search engine on its Safari browser on the iPhone and iPad.”
Currently Google is the default search engine for iOS. But it’s the default for a good reason: Google is by far the biggest search engine, and widely considered better than either Yahoo or Bing. And Yahoo can’t even think of trying to become default search on Google-owned Android or Microsoft-owned Windows Phone.
Apple has been trying to get away from Google and changed the default mapping service to Apple Maps in iOS 6, replacing Google Maps. However that was to Apple's own service. Why would Apple want to switch to Yahoo, when the only benefit is that it’d spite Google? A lot of users wouldn’t be happy with the change, even if it’s easy to change it back. That’s why this deal won’t happen until those projects are complete, if at all. Customers don’t want a different search provider, which is why currently 67.5 percent of all searches are done through Google.
