The agreement between Yahoo and Mozilla, which made Yahoo the default search engine for American Firefox users, has lowered the market share of Google's search engine. Google was the default search engine in Firefox for years, but last year Mozilla decided it wouldn't extend the contract with the search giant. In the United States Mozilla replaced Google by Yahoo.
In December 2014, 75.2% of American internet users used Google, a drop of 2.1%, according to StatCounter. It's even the lowest number since internet research company started to measure search engine market shares. Yahoo saw its market share grow with 1.8% from 8.6% to 10.4%. Yahoo now comes close to Microsoft's search engine Bing which is used by 12.5% of the American internet users.
The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google."
Firefox users represented just over 12% of US internet usage in December.
