Today, Mozilla announced they have a new partnership with Yahoo making Yahoo their new default search engine in Firefox. Yahoo outbid Google to end Mozilla’s ten-year, $280m partnership with them they formally had. What does this mean for Yahoo and Mozilla?

Does Google see the demise of Mozilla and allowed them to be purposely outbid? We all know they have more than enough money to out bid anyone. With many users going almost exclusively mobile and Firefox constantly receiving poor mobile user reviews, does this move give Google leverage to help promote Chrome for mobile and IOS users?

Clearly the big winner in this deal is Yahoo. This will be guaranteed income for them. I would fully expect to see a spike in Yahoo’s share of the searches made market. According to comScore, Google saw a net loss of .01% of the searches made in America during Q3 with Google holding 67.3% of the search market. Yahoo holds 10% with no quarterly change. Numbers for Q4 won’t be available until the end of the year, but with this change going into effect the beginning of December. I would expect some small net gains for Yahoo with even bigger gains for Q1 2015.

One thing I would keep in the back of my mind as a SEO is Yahoo optimization. We all know people who are not computer literate but know enough to know that Internet Explorer is terrible. The first thing they do is install a new browser and feel as if that is enough to protect them. Getting into settings and changing things is out of their safe zone. So they accept the default. This is why I believe there will be a gain in Yahoo searches made.

Share with others