Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer thinks that Yahoo can take on mobile search/personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Yahoo recently reached a five year high in its search volume thanks to a recent deal with Mozilla and the renegotiated terms of the 10 year search partnership with Microsoft will give Yahoo more flexibility to sell its own ads.
Marissa Mayer said “Those products are really heavily differentiated both from each other as well as from the historic legacy products, and so that’s really where we see an opportunity to play in something that’s mobile. And as it moves to, for example, the watch, and on to television screens and video we think that there’s a really interesting place to play there, to help people make better sense of the content they already have access to, content in their mail, using more context to actually provide higher quality results.”
For example when you are en route to an airport say JFK in New York, the search should bring up your boarding pass and the boarding gate number but current searches simply bring you information such as JFKs Wiki page. She says that search should be more context oriented and based on your schedule and activities, it should provide you apt search results.
Yahoo had launched the Aviate homescreen app for Android last year but it’s still in it’s early stages and will really have to step it up to compete with the likes of Siri, Cortana and Google Now.