Yahoo gains US search share, Google falls

With its newly acquired status as default search engine in Firefox, Yahoo has grown its share of the US search market in the last three months even as Google's portion dipped slightly infoworld.com reported.

Web analytics company StatCounter said neither were Yahoo's gains massive nor were Google's losses substantial.

In January, Yahoo's share of the US search market increased to 10.9 per cent, which was a minor increase from the 10.4 share, the struggling internet company claimed in January, as also a substantial increase over the 8.6 per cent share it held in November.

The gains last month were not enough to lift Yahoo past Microsoft Bing, which occupied the second spot with a market share of 12.4 per cent for January.

This was down slightly from the 12.5 per cent share held by Bing in December.

Google, meanwhile, maintained its dominant search position as it handled 74.8 per cent of US searches for January, though that figure marked the first time since July 2008, when StatCounter started tracking global search statistics, that Google's share fell under 75 per cent and was the third consecutive month that it lost US search share.

The internet search company in December, commanded a 75.2 per cent share, down from 77.3 per cent in November.

The San Francisco Business Times reported that Yahoo, a distant third at 10.9 per cent, had its highest share largely due to product placement as it was the new default browser for Mozilla Firefox. That had helped Yahoo catapult from 8.6 per cent of searches to the nearly 11-per cent stake it had today.

Meanwhile, Google had launched a campaign to woo users away from Yahoo, though, Yahoo was not through and CEO Marissa Mayer said her company would try to emerge as the default search engine on Apple's Safari browser as well.