Cape Town - Yahoo has experienced a jump in market share thanks to the Mozilla move to make it the default search engine in the Firefox browser.
According to StatCounter, the move by the Firefox producer resulted in Yahoo having a spike in growth, taking a small bite out of internet giant Google.
"The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search," said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter. "The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google."
In December, Mozilla ended its relationship with Google, making Yahoo the default search engine for US users.
Results from StatCounter show that Google is still by far the dominant search engine in the US with 75.2% market share, followed by Bing at 12.5% and Yahoo at 10.4%.
But it's not all bad news for Google. StatCounter numbers show that Chrome has consolidated its market share with 46.3%, Internet Explorer had a sudden December spike and is at 22.3%, while Firefox is flat at 16.3%.
In SA, Firefox only has a 13.1% market share, far behind Chrome (36.7%) and IE (32.9%).
Those results reflect on search engines in SA, where Google has a virtual monopoly with a 91.3% market share. Bing is at 5.3% and Yahoo has less than 2%.
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