Google Loses Some Search Marketshare

Posted on January 8, 2015

Google lost some of its search marketshare while Yahoo made gains. The unusual loss for Google in search comes from Mozilla's decision to make Yahoo the default in the latest version of its Firefox browser. The image above shows a Yahoo search result page for actress Jennifer Lawrence.

Bloomberg reports that Google's U.S. search marketshare fell to 75.2% from 79.3% according to data from StatCounter. Meanwhile, Yahoo's marketshare increased from 7.4% to 10.4%. Bing is in second place with 12.5%.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced last year that it has started a 5-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search engine on Firefox. Yahoo is the default on the Firefox 34 browser. Firefox 34 is the latest version of the Firefox browser and is currently available for download from mozilla.org. Users can switch away from the default browser but many users tend to keep things the way they are.

The gains are great for Yahoo but it may need another deal to boost its marketshare much higher. Firefox only has about a 12% share of U.S. users. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is considering dropping Google as the default provider for its Safari browser so there is another opportunity for Yahoo at least with mobile users.


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