Yahoo eating into Google’s search pie?
Google Search has seen a decrease in its share in December 2014, while Yahoo’s figures grew to highest US share over the last five years. According to data by analytics firm StatCounter, Google’s figures decreased to the lowest monthly share yet by the search giant.
Google fell to 75.2 per cent in December from 79.3 per cent a year ago. Yahoo on the other hand rose to 10.4 per cent from 7.4 per cent.
The change in results could be attributed to the new deal between Yahoo and Mozilla Firefox. On November 19, 2014, Yahoo and Mozilla signed a five year agreement which would make Yahoo the default search engine on Firefox on mobile and desktop.
According to StatCounter, users on Mozilla Firefox represented 12 per cent of US internet usage.
Speaking during the signing of the agreement with Mozilla, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO had said, “At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search – it’s an area of investment, opportunity and growth for us. This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and also gives us an opportunity to work closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate more broadly in search, communications, and digital content.”
While Google has its own browser, Google Chrome, which accounts for 29.97 per cent of the US internet users, it will be interesting to see how this deal affects the search giant in the future and whether users will be changing back to Google as their default search engine on Firefox.
