When you hear the news, Google has lost market share to Yahoo in terms of searches , you might expel a Scooby Doo grunt, ”huh”, and then ask yourself what this nonsense was about. Don’t go changing your browser homepage just yet as we break down what this all means.
In December 2014, Google declined to 75.2% from 79.3% in 2013, while Yahoo moved to 10.4% from 7.4% in the US search market*. I will give you a second to digest these figures…Not much in it, the owners of Google probably have the monetary equivalent of the share loss in their wallets. Even with the decline, the figures still show the colossal force that is google.com. And to think, this is the smallest share the company has seen since 2008.
What caused this monumental shift (I hope your sarcasm detector is on)? There has been an ongoing war right under our noses, the battle of which Internet Search service will be packaged with Mozilla’s Firefox, and Yahoo finally won at something, Alibaba excluded of course. This is thought to be the main driver behind this minor oscillation. Firefox itself has seen it share rise to 12% in the US market. The bad news is that this might be as good as it gets for Mozilla’s browser. Don’t forget Google has a little browser of its own, called Chrome. Hmmm, I wonder what search engine they will package with their browser. According to Bizjournals.com, Chrome holds the majority share (35%) of browser usage in the States, followed closely by IE (31%). With Microsoft re-introducing its browser for its Windows 10 OS, things are going to get a little more stretched for Firefox and Yahoo.
I’m sure that Google already envisaged the minute loss of share when they lost the battle for Firefox but I also believe they know that this race is not a sprint but a marathon. Let’s be honest, you are never going to hear the words, “Wait a sec, let me Yahoo that”
*as quoted by Statcounter CEO Aodhan Cullen