In a somewhat surprising announcement, David Watanabe has announced that Inquisitor, his search extension for Safari, has been acquired by Yahoo. This announcement was made simultaneously with the release of Inquisitor 3.1. Among the changes in Inquisitor 3.1 is the default search engine for new users is now set to Yahoo (it was previously Google).
Details on the acquisition are a little scarce. No word on the acquisition price or other details. What is known is that Watanabe will not join Yahoo, but will remain the lead developer of Inquisitor.
So what’s in this for Yahoo? I suspect the acquisition is just an attempt to buy search queries. The search box in Safari is powered by Google. If you install Inquisitor, the search box now defaults to Yahoo. Yahoo is paying for your searches.
Disclosure: I own a small number of Yahoo shares.
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