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Mozilla Deal Helps Boost Yahoo Search Share

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Mozilla Deal Helps Boost Yahoo Search Share

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Yahoo’s market share in the online search world is slowly on its way up, according to new figures from StatCounter.

In December, Yahoo hit a search share of 10.4 percent. That doesn’t sound like a very big number compared to rival Google at 75.2 percent and Microsoft Bing at 12.5 percent. However, it’s the biggest share for Yahoo’s search engine that Statcounter has recorded at any point over the last five years or so.

Of, course, it does help that Yahoo got a not-so-insignificant boost to the number of people using its search engine (which is powered by Microsoft’s Bing, technically) when it was made the default search engine on Mozilla’s Firefox browser recently.

It’s also interesting to note that Yahoo’s gain—from 7.4 percent one year ago to 10.4 percent in December—came at the same time that Google lost some market share, dropping from 79.3 percent to 75.2 percent during the same time period. December’s market share for Google represents the company’s lowest since 2008, according to StatCounter’s figures, at least.

As for Yahoo, the company’s partnership with Mozilla started in December, which involved replacing Google as the default search engine for the company’s Firefox browser (starting with version 34). However, according to Statcounter(Opens in a new window), far more desktop users fired up Chrome than Firefox in December 2014—around 32.5 percent for Chrome, and just around 13.6 percent for Firefox. On smartphones, it’s a blowout: 35.7 percent for Chrome versus just around 0.4 percent for Firefox. Still, Yahoo’s integration into Firefox did generally help its figures.

“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on U.S. search. The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google,” said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter CEO, in a statement(Opens in a new window).

Hold off on popping the champagne over at Yahoo’s purple headquarters just yet. “I doubt Google needs to worry. For one, that’s probably the high water mark. Unless Firefox suddenly grows share, everyone who likely could get switched has been now. And Google might claw back even the small share gone,” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan said in an email interview with Bloomberg(Opens in a new window).

For more, check out Why You Should Use Yahoo Search (No, Really).

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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-deal-helps-boost-yahoo-search-share