Yahoo and Microsoft Vie For Apple’s Affections For 2015

With its four-year partnership with Google coming to an end in 2015, Apple is the belle of the mobile search ball as it looks for a new partner to be its default search provider for its Safari products, and Yahoo and Microsoft are gunning to be picked for the next dance.

As Yahoo and Microsoft already have relationships with Apple—the former provides stock data to iOS and the latter provides Siri with Bing search results—they are eagerly looking to expand said relationships in order to become the default search provider for all iOS devices and Macs. Both companies are apparently appealing to Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, Eddie Cue; his decision will be based “on the quality of the product as much as the potential money made from search ads.”

Why the battle is so important? Safari, used on all of Apple’s mobile devices and computers, has a larger US browser share than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, according to a report from StatCounter. That being said, winning Apple’s affections would prove significant for either Bing or Yahoo.

The battle for Apple’s search engine affections is only the latest in the competition between Yahoo and Microsoft to gain a bigger share of the search engine market after Google’s lion share. If Yahoo wins the Apple deal they will still benefit in terms of shared ad revenue, Yahoo is still eying the possibility of separation from Bing as soon as legally possible.

According to the blog Mac Rumors, Yahoo has approached Apple in the past about expanding their relationship on mobile, although Apple ended up excluding Yahoo for weather data in iOS 8, using data directly from The Weather Channel. That being said, getting the search engine partnership will be an uphill battle for Yahoo. They have also apparently been working on a revamp of its mobile search as part of its efforts to land the partnership deal with Apple.

As the information divulges, it is more likely that Apple would work better with Bing, if it decides to make a change at all, since it currently uses Bing web search to backfill Siri and for Spotlight Search on the iMac.

Despite the effort of the two suitors vying for its affections, Apple has yet to reveal whether it even plans to change search engine providers at all. It may remain with Google, or, as some rumors may have it, attempt to strike out on its own by developing its own product in terms of a search engine.