Yahoo and Firefox (Photo : www.techcrunch.com)
Google might be slowly dying as a search engine as Yahoo's online search market share is steadily increasing, according to updated figures from StatCounter.
PCMag reports that Yahoo observed an increased search share from 7.4 percent in 2013 up to 10.4 percent in December 2014, nearing the gap with Microsoft Bing's 12.5 percent, but is still miles away from Google's 75.2 percent.
However, while Yahoo is slowly increasing, Google lost more than 4 percent of its share during the same period. It is also the lowest figures for the search giant in StatCounter since 2008.
The increase in Yahoo's share can be attributed to its deal with Mozilla to be Firefox's default search engine in December. For years, Google has been the browser's default search engine since its version 34. Mozilla did not renew its contract with Google and has then switched to Yahoo.
But, it is still a little early for the purple web service portal to celebrate as StatCounter reports that there are far more Chrome users instead of Firefox users in December 2014. Only about 13.6 percent used Firefox, while 32.5 percent used Google's browser. Additionally, only about 0.4 percent of smartphone users used Firefox, while 35.7 percent preferred Chrome.
BGR reports that Mozilla is not the only one who has thought of giving Google the boot. Apple is also reported to be considering taking Google out of its Safari browser on iOS and tech giant Microsoft and Yahoo are now competing to be Apple's default search engine.
