Yahoo’s inclusion as the default search choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser in the U.S. has given the search engine a major boost, helping it achieve its biggest share gain since 2009.
According to latest data coming from independent website analytics provider StatCounter, in December 2014, Yahoo accounted for 10.4 per cent of the US search share, up from 8.6 per cent in November, showing an improvement of 1.8 percentage points.
Search giant Google’s U.S market share on the other hand dropped from 77.3 per cent to 75.2 per cent in the same time period. That’s its lowest market share since tracking began in 2008. Second-place Bing remained largely unchanged, hovering at around 12.5 per cent share.
The changes were attributed to a November deal where Yahoo replaced Google as the default search engine on Firefox browsers in the U.S. According to StatCounter, Firefox users represented slightly more than 12 percent of U.S. Internet usage in December.
“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, in a press release.
“The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.
StatCounter Global Stats data is based on over 15 billion page views per month to over three million websites.
Google, Yahoo and Mozilla are yet to comment on StatCounter’s ranking report.
