Yahoo Inc will supplant Google Inc’s search engine on Firefox’s Web browser in the US, signaling Yahoo’s resolve to regain some of the ground that it has lost in the most lucrative part of the Internet’s advertising market.
The five-year alliance announced on Wednesday will end a decade-old partnership in the US between Google and the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the Firefox browser. The tensions between Google and Mozilla had been rising since Google’s introduction of the Chrome browser in 2008 began to undercut Firefox. Google’s current contract with Mozilla expires at the end of this month, opening an opportunity for Yahoo to pounce.
Even though Chrome is now more widely used, Firefox still has a loyal audience who make more than 100 billion worldwide search requests annually.
Financial details of Yahoo’s Firefox contract were not disclosed.
In a blog post, Mozilla chief executive officer Chris Beard said the new deal offers “strong, improved economic terms” while allowing Mozilla “to innovate and advance our mission in ways that best serve our users and the Web.”
Google accounted for 90 percent, or about US$274 million, of Mozilla’s royalty revenue in 2012. Mozilla has not released its annual report for last year.
Besides dropping Google in the US, Mozilla is also shifting Firefox to Baidu’s (百度) search engine in China and Yandex in Russia. Firefox users still have the option to pull down a tab to pick Google and other search engines as their preferred way for looking up information online.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, hailed the Firefox agreement as Yahoo’s most significant partnership since forging the Microsoft deal in 2009.
“We believe deeply in search — it’s an area of investment and opportunity for us,” Mayer wrote in a blog post.
Yahoo plans to unveil a “clean and modern” search engine on Firefox next month and then roll out the new model on its own Web site early next year, Mayer wrote.
The redesign will primarily affect how Yahoo’s search engine’s results are displayed, and not the way that requests are processed. The search technology will continue to be provided by Microsoft as part of a 10-year deal Yahoo signed in 2009, according to Mel Guymon, Yahoo’s vice president of search.
Yahoo is expected to end this year with a 5.6 percent share of US search advertising revenue, down from 6.6 percent in 2012, according to the research firm eMarketer.
Yahoo’s stock gained US$0.52 to US$51.10 in extended trading on Wednesday.
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