American Firefox users dump Yahoo and go back to Google

The effects of the search deal between Yahoo and Firefox developer Mozilla seem to have worked out.  The rise in Yahoo usage from last year has already disappeared.

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Earlier internet research companies reported Yahoo saw its market share increase due to the deal between Mozilla and Yahoo, making the latter the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser. Google had been the default search engine in Firefox for years and Mozilla decided to not extend their contract in favor of Yahoo.  This caused Google's market share to drop to its lowest point in the last 7 years, however the company still accounts for handling  75% of all searches by American internet users.

But it seems Yahoo users are switching back to Google again. Digital marketing company RKG monitored advertising clicks and noticed that the number of clicks on Yahoo Ads by Firefox users peaked at 43% in December, but now dropped to 36%. The company reports the opposite happens for Google Adwords advertisements, clicks on the advertisements Google shows next to its seach results are more often coming from Firefox users again.

Paid advertisements are a fair indicator of search engine usage and the decrease of Yahoo Ads clicks from Firefox users indicate users switch back to Google again. Mark Ballard of RKG concludes users manually switch back their default search engine to Google. Another possibility is that users ignore Firefox's search features and manually surf to the Google website.

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