Tech company to develop new app that competes with Google Now

Yahoo may be behind in the search business, but it may be working in a way to compete with Google and Microsoft when it comes to a personalized search tools. At an earnings call on Tuesday, Yahoo CEO (and former Google executive) Marissa Mayer said Yahoo was “particularly interested in search in the mobile sector, what happens when you involve context,” at it seems to be paying attention to “what happens when you involve personal information, from things like email.”

Yesterday, Business Insider reported that a source has provided more details about the project, which is assumed to be known within the company’s private circles as Index.

Index could be a smartphone app, as a follow-up to Yahoo’s Aviate launcher for Android. Aviate is a personal assistant that uses smartphone data and calendar entries, but the new app will act more like Google Now and mine information from the users’ inbox.

At the call, Mayer mentioned things like Siri, Cortana and Google Now as new and promising kinds of search.

She said Yahoo wants to help people “make better sense of the content they already have access to, content in their mail,” as mobile movies move to “the watch and onto television screens and video,” to provide better results.

Business Insider’s source, though, say that Yahoo thinks its advantage is in sheer longevity:

"Gmail users have only had their accounts for 10 years. Yahoo has many 20-year-old accounts. Back then people used to email themselves a lot — store things. To surface that kind of data usefully is exciting."