“In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox’s default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States,” Stephen Shankland reports for CNET. “‘I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into a five-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox across mobile and desktop,’ Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post Wednesday. ‘This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years.'”
“The change will come to Firefox users in the US in December, and later Yahoo will bring that new “clean, modern and immersive search experience” to all Yahoo search users. In another part of the deal, Yahoo will support the Do Not Track technology for Firefox users, meaning that it will respect users’ preferences not to be tracked for advertising purposes,” Shankland reports. “The Yahoo-Mozilla deal is an alliance of underdogs. Mozilla’s share of browser usage has been slipping in recent months, and Yahoo is third place with 10 percent of US searches in October, according to ComScore. For Yahoo, that was still enough for quarterly search revenue of $450 million, after payments to the affiliates that helped drive some of that search traffic. That was a 6 percent year-over-year increase, Yahoo said.”
“Yahoo sold off its search business to Microsoft five years ago, and Microsoft powers Yahoo search results. However, Yahoo keeps some of the revenue — indeed, all of it for mobile searches,” Shankland reports. “Yahoo declined to comment on specific revenue share terms of that deal.”
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