Firefox gave Yahoo a much-needed search engine boost

Considering that Google has been Mozilla’s bread and butter practically since its foundation, it came as a surprise to many that the company would choose to abandon Google as the default search engine for its Firefox web browser in favor of Yahoo. Either way, this has been a much-needed boost for Yahoo’s dying search engine.

When Mozilla announced that Yahoo would be replacing Google as the default search choice in Firefox in the US, there were raised eyebrows everywhere. After all, Google has been baked into Firefox for the past decade, and Yahoo’s days as a top search engine are long gone. Or were long gone at least. Yahoo’s inclusion in Firefox has given the ailing search engine a major boost, helping it achieve its highest US search share since 2009. Unsurprisingly, this share increase came at the expense of Google. According to independent website analytics provider StatCounter, in December 2014, Yahoo claimed 10.4 percent of the US search share, up from 8.6 percent in November. That’s an improvement of 1.8 percentage points. Google dropped from 77.3 percent to 75.2 percent in the same time period. That’s its lowest search share in the US since StatCounter began recording search data in 2010.