Google sees biggest traffic drop in five years as Yahoo grows

Recent numbers by StatCounter show that Yahoo has achieved remarkable growth in the last month while Google’s search traffic dropped.

In the US at least, the world’s largest search engine faced a drop of 2.1% between November and December after Mozilla announced that its Firefox web browser would be ditching Google for Yahoo as its default search engine in the US.

“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.” Firefox users represented just over 12% of US internet usage in December according to StatCounter.

Read more: Yahoo will become the default search engine for Firefox in the US

A small drop by Google can mean a lot for its search alternatives. Naturally Google still holds a foothold of over 75% of the US marketshare with Microsoft’s Bing coming in second at 12.5% and Yahoo at 10.4%. The latter saw a predictable 2.2% jump in traffic after the Firefox deal was finalised, which means Yahoo achieved over 20% growth in November.

Globally Google currently holds nearly 88% of the web’s search traffic. While this is a massive monopoly, the search giant saw a 1% drop over the last twelve months.

Either way, Google competitors such as Yahoo, Bing and Baidu would have to show more than browser deals if they are to secure greater market share in the next decade.