MELBOURNE: Google has seen its share of the US internet search market slip to its lowest point since 2008, while Yahoo has risen to its highest share in five years, an independent analytics firm says.
In December, Google handled 75.2 per cent of US online search referrals, down from 79.3 per cent a year earlier. That score is its lowest since StatCounter started tracking the data more than six years ago.
Google nevertheless remains the US leader in the search market by a wide margin, ahead of Microsoft’s Bing at 12.5 per cent and Yahoo at 10.4 per cent — its highest score since 2009.
Yahoo, whose chief Marissa Mayer has repeatedly stressed that the company remains devoted to the search market that it pioneered but which Google grew to dominate, only had 7.4 per cent of the search market a year before.
Meanwhile, Google handled 92.82 per cent of Australian online search referrals in December, up slightly from 92.5 per cent a year earlier.
Yahoo handled 1.33 per cent of Australian search traffic in December compared to 1.09 per cent a year earlier. Microsoft’s Bing was at 4.88 per cent in December, up from 4.84 per cent a year earlier.
The changes in the US were spurred by a deal in November where Yahoo replaced Google as the default search engine on Firefox browsers in the US. Google had been the automatic search option for Firefox, which was developed by Mozilla, since 2004.
StatCounter reports a drop in Google search share of more than 2 percentage points between November and December last year.
“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search,” StatCounter chief executive officer Aodhan Cullen said. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.”
Firefox users represented slightly more than 12 per cent of US internet usage in December, according to StatCounter.
