Marissa Mayer Says Yahoo Would 'Welcome the Opportunity' to Become Default Safari Search Engine

[ipedro]

Spotlight Search (powered by Yahoo!)

Yahoo! should give Apple an irrefusable offer. Make Yahoo! the back end to a Spotlight Search engine powered by Yahoo!.

Let Siri search Yahoo by default and present the results inside of Siri. Similarly, let Spotlight in iOS and OS X search Yahoo by default and present the results in a clean, Spotlight branded UI.

In return, Yahoo! would get to provide hooks for their other services (weather, news, etc) and get the valuable search analytics that they can use to grow their database and improve the quality of their search results.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I started using DuckDuckGo and so far have been more than happy enough with the results to ditch google completely.

...though, I thought they were one of those search arbiter kind of things, where when you search, DDG takes your searchwords, does the google search for those words, take the results, and hand them back to you. ...so as far as google knows, DDG's servers are doing all the searching, not you. Seems like an easy enough way to get the best of both worlds.

 

[paul4339]

Mayer is just living with (and trying to undo) the mess that her predecessors made. ex-CEO Carol Bartz signed a 5-year contract with MS and abandoned their own search engine.

That contract is expiring in February 2015, I think.

So naturally, she's just trying drum up business, if they plan to re-enter into search.

.

 

[Paddle1]

They'll change to Bing, they've already done it with Siri.

 

[jtrenthacker]

I'll also welcome the opportunity to change it back to google.

 

[silvetti]

DuckDuckGO for me.

Yahoo only for Flickr

 

[arkmannj]

I think Apple would be more likely to build/buy their own Search Engine than to make Yahoo! the default. Just my thought.

 

[nia820]

Well good for Marissa. But unfortunately America doesn't want yahoo search. This isn't 1998 anymore

 

[Blorzoga]

No thanks, Marissa. If yahoo inserts ads in search results like it does within news haadlines, I'll make sure to change the default back to Google.

 

[macduke]

Is Yahoo search any good now? I literally have not used it since 2003. Not once. I did try Bing once—aren't they essentially the same now? But that was also years ago.

 

[SolarShane]

No thank you. For me, Google always gives the best results.

Just try searching for "Game Capture HD Linux Driver" on Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo gives me nothing but wrong results and mounds of spam download links. Google on the other hand, the second result takes me to the Github Repo of the Linux Driver. The first result is the correct website and download page from Elgato.

You know there's something wrong with your search engine if your search algorithm turns up wrong results and/or spam download links.

 

[MagicBoy]

It's called Bing.. and it has for some time now in images, maps, and search. Try it some time.

I have tried it - can't change the default on my Windows PC at work due to one of my colleagues bolting IE down far too much via Group Policy. Other than Microsofts own sites the results are filled with too many irrelevant sites for my liking. Google nail it on the head with a site containing the information I'm looking for in the first page the majority of the time.

 

[apolloa]

And I would most certainly welcome winning the lottery 5 times Marissa, but guess what buddy? IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN!!

I stay well away from Yahoo considering they've been hacked so much..

 

[Bill Killer]

I have the Google app already installed on my iPhone/iPad, along with using Chrome on my MBP. So this really wouldn't affect me since I really don't use Safari conduct searches on my iPhone/iPad/MBP.

I honestly can't remember the last time I ever used Yahoo to search for something.

Chrome and Google app =/ Google search

 

[crosseyedbum]

Here is my thought

No.

 

[flyinmac]

Somehow I end up on yahoo accidentally on occasion. I think some of my browsers got their default changed somehow.

I never really notice who the search is being sent through. But I always notice when the results are crap. And that's when I look and see that it says yahoo on the results page. And since I didn't see what I was looking for, I'll open google, do the same search and usually with the top 2 or 3 results is what I had wanted.

Yahoo is great if I want to go back to 1995 and run searches through 10 search engines for a variety of results. But if you just want to get the answer and get back to work, then Google is the way to go.

 

[TouchMint.com]

Yea yahoo search sucks. My Firefox got changed to it recently and it was real annoying until I figured out what had happened and I turned it back.

 

[aaronvan]

But she'll make more than you, your parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends COMBINED makes in a lifetime - just on her severance package.

Congrats, you just won the Super Bowl of non sequiturs.

 

[Keirasplace]

I have tried it - can't change the default on my Windows PC at work due to one of my colleagues bolting IE down far too much via Group Policy. Other than Microsofts own sites the results are filled with too many irrelevant sites for my liking. Google nail it on the head with a site containing the information I'm looking for in the first page the majority of the time.

Well, good for you because for me, Google is as off the mark as Bing or whatever, they're ALL BAD. Search engines nowadays are just random publicity generators.

 

[Bawstun]

Hey Marissa - your search engine sucks.

It's horrible. Dare I say - almost unusable. Don't believe me? Try it for a week.

I did, when Firefox defaulted to it in their latest versions. I tried it, for a week.

Never, ever, ever, again - horrible search engine and horrible company. Abort.

 

[huffcw]

As long as I can switch it to Bing, I'm don't care. (And even though Bing supposedly powers Yahoo -- the way the search results work seems to be very different.)

I used to use Google, but have come to like Bing better. Once in a great while when I think I am not getting a good search result from Bing, I try Google and almost always find that it doesn't pull up anything different/better. I also did several blind tests and Bing came out even or ahead for me every time.

I particularly like how Bing works for searching images and videos.

 

[SgtPepper12]

They should change that logo. It looks so awful, it causes me physical pain. It's bad in every respect that I can think of.

More on topic, I actually use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. I'm not particularly paranoid about Google basically knowing me better than my mom, but I thought I should at least try to make it somewhat difficult for them. However, it just doesn't work for me at all. It almost always gives me results that are not really relevant. Fortunately it has the g! functionality, so I can use Google without them tracking me.

 

[batchtaster]

So, the default would essentially be Bing then?

It would be exactly Bing. Just Bing Search with Yahoo Passthrough. Yahoo are a middleman who bring nothing to the table. (Their modus operandi and status quo for the last 5 years.)

Hey Marissa - your search engine sucks.

It's horrible. Dare I say - almost unusable. Don't believe me? Try it for a week.

I did, when Firefox defaulted to it in their latest versions. I tried it, for a week.

Never, ever, ever, again - horrible search engine and horrible company. Abort.

Umm.... you know "her" search engine is Microsoft Bing, right?

 

[Keane16]

You must work with an awful lot of brain dead people or alternatively people who hanker for the tech of 20th Century! Yahoo has to be the worst company for customer service I have ever encountered, they deliberately do not have a telephone number for customer support. Adobe does the same thing and their non existent customer service is probably worse, at least Yahoo don't charge for using their software!

Whoa, slow down cowboy. They're are perfectly capable well educated people - good at their jobs. They don't NEED Google search results. For their day jobs IE and Bing (the defaults on their machines) do just fine. Mostly of their browser usage will be for SharePoint which seems to work better with IE anyway. And I imagine they'll do a bit of web browsing on their lunch hours.

I wouldn't be surprised if "normal" non-tech people even understand that there are different underlying algorithms. More likely they don't care. They type a search and results pop up like magic. In the same way I don't understand or care about the complexities of nuclear reactions - it may as well be magic to me. Like I said, what exactly does Google do for the normal user that Bing or DuckDuckGo doesn't? I imagine most wouldn't even notice much difference. These users would be very lucrative for Yahoo if they became the default engine for Safari as a percentage would continue to use Yahoo indefinitely.

Just because we might use the advanced features or prefer the results of Google, doesn't mean everyone does - it always surprises when I hear their market share for search is "only" 66% - I always think it'd be much higher.

Also I have no idea what support has to do with it. We're talking search engines. In the ~20 yeas I've been using them I have never had to call support. Neither have I had to pay for this "software". Think you've gone off track buddy.

 

[haravikk]

I'm using DuckDuckGo as my default; I'm not happy with some of the search results (I've had to switch to Google when searching for articles related to programming in Swift, for example), but for general searching it works really well.