The dominance of Google Inc. in the US search market has slipped in December, its biggest drop following their 2009 struggle. Yahoo Inc, on the other hand, posted its biggest share gain.
The analytics company StatCounter has reported that Google fell down to 75.2% from their previous year's 79.3% in their US search market share, while Yahoo leaped high to 10.4% from their last year's 7.4. This marks Google's lowest US web search market share since 2008 and Yahoo's highest since 2009.
All of the changes were speculated to have been caused by a special deal back in November where Yahoo took over Google as Firefox's default search engine- an automated search option developed by the California-based corporation, Mountain View.
Mozilla's partnership with Google ended within US and many other countries around the globe. While it has been a default search engine for 10 years, the great honor now has been transferred to Yahoo in countries like the US, Baidu in China, and Yandex in Russia.
In a few other locations, Google has remained as the default browser; however, it could change anytime.
In November, a Yahoo representative told WebProNews, "This, with great honor, is Yahoo's most significant partnership in five years." She adds, "Yahoo will be introducing an enhanced web experience for all Firefox users."
Chris Beard, Mozilla CEO on the other hand, said "Our primary consideration in evaluating our partnerships is to make sure that both of our strategies are aligned with our independence and choice values. It is important that we are brought to a position where we can advance our mission in methods that can serve all our users best."