Tag Archive for: search engine market share

Google has had a strong grip on the vast majority of web traffic, but a new report suggests they are losing their grasp. In just two weeks since Yahoo replaced Google as the default search engine in Firefox’s latest version, the search engine has experienced a 29.4 percent growth in usage, while Google has experienced a significant drop.

Analytics firm StatCounter said that “Yahoo search was used three times more on Firefox 34 than on Firefox 33.”

It should be noted, the user base of Firefox 24 is relatively low as many users haven’t upgraded yet and Firefox’s US market share overall is only about 15 percent. However, StatCounter still showed that Yahoo has benefited a fair amount from this deal, growing from 9.6 percent to 29.4 percent. In comparison, Google usage in the latest version of Firefox fell from 82.1 percent to 63.5 percent.

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In the big picture it is clear that Google still has a massive lead on other search engines, but that lead doesn’t seem near as solid as it once did. This report shows that “default” search engines still hold a lot of influence over how users interact with the web. With Google’s agreement with Safari also coming to an end in the near future, there is a large chance that Yahoo or Bing could continue to make significant gains.