Yahoo Search Share Has Increased Since Firefox Deal

New data released from StatCounter indicates that the recent Yahoo-Firefox default search deal is paying off. The report shows that Yahoo has experienced an almost 2 point search market share gain in the U.S. in the past month, marking the highest U.S. search share for Yahoo since 2009. StatCounter, the independent website analytics provider, reported that Google fell to its lowest monthly share yet recorded by the company. Attributing Yahoo’s growth to the recent deal with Mozilla to make it the default search engine for Firefox 34 users in the U.S., the reports indicate that in December, Google took 75.2% of U.S. search referrals followed by Bing at 12.5% and Yahoo at 10.4%. While Yahoo’s share has increased, Google clearly remains the leader in search.

“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on U.S. search,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.” The Yahoo-Firefox deal was announced in November, and, according to StatCounter, the web browser has approximately 16% of the share of the U.S. market. If this growth continues, it may help Yahoo increase its ad revenue to better compete against rivals such as Google and Facebook. However, it’s too early to know how many Firefox 34 users will change the default Yahoo search back to Google or to another search engine.

Among Firefox 34 users last month, StatCounter showed Yahoo to have the following significant search increase:

For its search engine statistics, StatCounter analyzes a network of over 3 million websites and tallies every page view that comes from a search engine. The company doesn’t tally search queries, but instead considers the page referrals from search engines to those 3 million websites. We’ll be watching this growth carefully over the coming period to see if it holds up. Yahoo is expected to report both quarterly and full year 2014 revenues on January 27.