Yahoo considering purchase of news summarizing app Summly

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is looking at buying Summly, an app created by boy genius Nick D'Aloisio to summarize news articles, according to a report from All Things D.

Mayer met with the teenage D'Aloisio in recent weeks, unnamed sources told All Things D. The app uses an algorithm to pull out relevant information from news articles and turns them into neat paragraphs that fit on an iPhone screen, while also linking to the full article.

CNET has contacted both Yahoo and Summly for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.

Summly would be an attractive buy for Yahoo, as Mayer revs up her search for apps to bolster the company's presence in the mobile. Mayer expressed during a quarterly earnings call that "a focused, coherent mobile strategy," is the company's top priority. The company boasted more than 500,000 downloads in its first month. If Yahoo did buy Summly, it would be the company's third acquisition since Mayer took over this past July.

Yahoo acquired Stamped, a recommendations engine app, in late October, and mobile video-chat startup OnTheAir earlier this month.

The technology behind Summly, started out as an app called Trimit, which summarized the information in Web pages. D'Aloisio created it as a tool to help him comb through the vast amount of information he needed to review for his school work. Soon Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, founder and chairman of of Horizon Ventures, invested $250,000 in D'Aloisio's company and Trimit was renamed as Summly. On Halloween, Summly relaunched as a news summarizing app.

Coincidentally, this news comes as D'Aloisio celebrates the first anniversary of Summly's first launch.