Apple already offers Yahoo weather and finance data pre-loaded on the iPhone, but Yahoo and Apple are reportedly in talks to get more cozy, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer came on to the job in July 2012 with the hope that she could turn the stagnant tech giant around. She had admitted that because Yahoo doesn’t make mobile hardware or a mobile OS, it would need to work on building powerful partnerships. Apple likely considers Yahoo an ideal partner for data because it doesn’t want to rely on Google, which it more directly competes with when it comes to mobile.
The new, deeper partnership could include providing more data to Apple’s voice assistant Siri, which already gets data for sports statistics. Apple also could pre-load content from Yahoo, including Yahoo News stories.
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That said, it’s unlikely that Apple will tap Yahoo for search as a replacement for Google. Yahoo’s search results are actually provided by Microsoft’s Bing, due to a 10-year deal that put in place in 2009. Apple and Microsoft also compete on many fronts, so we wouldn’t expect Apple to rely on them in any way.
While the deal isn’t imminent, it does reveal how serious Mayer is about getting Yahoo services and data into more people’s hands. Mayer recently said Yahoo had 200 million monthly visitors to its services through mobile devices. No doubt she’d like that number to grow.
Marissa Mayer photo via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat
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