As we reported at the end of last week, Google has lost the biggest amount of its U.S. search share since 2009, and since this happens to be a growing zero sum game, their share of the U.S. search market has dropped by four percentage points to 75.2% as opposed to 79.3% one year ago. The question is, which party in particular benefited from this particular drop? It was none other than Yahoo, who in turn managed to post its largest share gain.
In fact, Yahoo Inc.’s share of the U.S. search market surged to more than 10% in the previous month, and this has been largely attributed to Yahoo ending up as the default option on the most recent version of the Firefox browser. Of course, if not that many people use Firefox, then it would not be too much of a worry for Google, but then again with the drop in Google’s share and Yahoo’s subsequent rise, this means that a fair number of people are also using Firefox – and does this translate to a loss of market share for Google’s Chrome browser as well?
Perhaps – as the most recent version of Firefox was introduced just last month, so perhaps having something new in the market to try out might have enticed some folks to make the jump. However, perhaps it would be prudent to wait it out for a few more months in order for things to normalize themselves.
StatCounter Chief Executive Aodhan Cullen shared, “The shift is not a huge amount, but it is historically significant. The question is, are users going to switch back to Google, or are they going to stick with Yahoo.”
In fact, after the switch to Yahoo was made, Yahoo’s search engine actually saw action three times more on the most recent version of Firefox as opposed to the browser’s previous version, says StatCounter.
Filed in . Read more about Firefox and Yahoo. Source: dispatch