Mozilla, the maker of the highly popular Firefox web browser has announced that it will be changing its default search provider from Google Search to various local search engines for different regions across the globe.
Credits: Lucian Milasan / Shutterstock.com
Google has always been the default search provider for Firefox web browser ever since the latter’s launch in 2004. But this will not be case starting next month.
“We are ending our practice of having a single global default search provider,” said Chris Beard, CEO at Mozilla Corporation in a blog post. He also mentioned that they will be adopting a more local and flexible approach for increasing the choice and innovation on the internet. That’s why Firefox will come with different default search providers for various regions.
Firefox will have Yandex set as its default search provider in Russia and Baidu for China. This comes without saying that the users will be able to able to switch to any other search provider of their choice by going to the ‘Settings’.
How will it affect the dominance of Google Search?
Firefox is the third most widely used browser in the world after Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It also sends a total of 100 billion search queries to Google Search every year. So, this decision of Mozilla to switch to other local search providers will hit Google Search and web publishers in a big way.
This decision to set Yahoo Search as its default search provider came as Mozilla’s decade long partnership with Google came to an end. The new search partnership with Yahoo will last for 5 years and end in 2019.
“We are so proud that they(Mozilla) have chosen us as their long-term partner in search, and I can’t wait to see what innovations we build together,” said Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO.
Please be informed that it is the Bing Search from Microsoft which does the crawling and content indexing for Yahoo Search. Yahoo and Bing signed an agreement to share the ad revenue 5 years ago. This agreement is valid for 10 years and allows Yahoo to customize the search results for optimizing the user experience. So, this deal will also help boost up Bing’s revenue by a lot.
So, if you are a hard-core Firefox and Google fan then you should manually change your default search provider starting December 2014. I would also advise content publishers and bloggers to change their search engine marketing tactics a bit especially if they are focusing on the US audience.
One Comment
Arun Kumar
but y from a large company to small company