The first numbers show the effects of the decision

Jan 9, 2015 08:12 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla decided a couple of months ago to change the default search engine from Google to Yahoo and it looks like it's really making an impact on Google, especially in the US.

Changing the default search engine might not seem like a big deal because users can always change it back with just one click. The only problem is that most of the users don't really change anything in their browsers. They don't install add-ons, they don't customize the browsers, and they definitely don't change any default settings.

The number of people who actually care what browser they are using is not all that big, so when Mozilla decided to go for Yahoo, that showed right away in percentages. Firefox is not the number one browser in the world, but it still commands a large swath of real estate. When big changes are made to it, they are going to be noticed.

This does not sound good for Google

What many people don't know is that there is a lot of money involved in such deals. Just a few years back, when Mozilla said that it would feature Google as default search engine, they managed to squeeze dozens of millions of dollars from the company. Such deals are very profitable, especially for the ones making the browser.

Now Google has its own browsers and they don't want to pay of a prime spot on Firefox. That's to be understandable, but they also have to weigh whether losing just a few percentages of market share was really worth it.

According to a report on businesswire.com, "StatCounter Global Stats reports that in December Google took 75.2% of US search referrals followed by Bing on 12.5% and Yahoo on 10.4%." That is basically a 2% drop for Google and a 4% increase for Yahoo. They might seem small numbers, but if you convert them into lost and gained money, they’re actually not.

The same kind of comparison needs to be made in a year, to properly gauge the impact of Mozilla's decision, but until then it looks like Yahoo is gaining a little bit of ground.