News & Events

Written by Michael Levanduski
November 24, 2014

Yahoo has been working on building up the number of searches they are getting through their search engine for years, with little success.  In the coming days, however, they may see a significant boost without really having to do a thing.  This is because the world’s third most used browser, Firefox, has made a change to their default serach engine.

When FireFox users type something into the address bar, it has done a Google search automatically and display the results since 2004.   Starting in December, however, all US users will have a search done through the Yahoo search engine.  The browser is making adjustments to other regions as well.  In Russia, for example, Firefox users will have a search done using Yandex, a popular option in that country.  China will be using Baidu.

According to the announcement, this will impact more than 100 Billion searches each year.

This change is set to last for at least five years, according to the agreement between Yahoo and Firefox.  Of course, users can manually go through and adjust their default search engine back to Google, or to virtually any other search engine that they would like.  Most people, however, tend to leave the settings at default.

Exactly how big of a bump this will mean in the long term is not known, but it may be significant.  Of course, this won’t make Yahoo bigger than Google, or even in the same range as them.  It will, however, undoubtedly be a major change in the search engine wars.