Google loses biggest US search share since 2009

According to market researcher StatCounter, Google’s portion of the US search engine market slipped to 75.2 percent in December, down from 79.3 percent the previous year – its biggest slide since at least 2008, when StatCounter began collecting data. Meanwhile, following the closure of a deal with Mozilla Firefox earlier in 2014 which made it the default search engine on all of Firefox’s browsers, Yahoo reported its largest share gain since 2009, jumping from 7.4 percent to 10.4 percent. But it’s not Google’s biggest competitor just yet, sitting 2.1 percentage points behind Bing, which makes up 12.5 percent.

Google still accounts for 88 percent of the search market

The browser market on personal computers in the US is dominated by Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with a 37 percent and 34 percent share respectively in 2014, while Firefox accounts for around 12 percent, according to data from StatCounter. “The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search”, StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen told Bloomberg. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.”

On a global scale, Google still accounts for 88 percent of the search market, while Bing and Yahoo take 4.5 and 4.4 percent respectively. However speculation that Apple is contemplating dropping Google as the default search engine on Safari browsers is rife as competition between the two companies intensifies – Google’s Android OS scooped up 84 percent of smart phones shipped during Q3 of 2014, while Apple’s iOS took just 12 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. If so, Yahoo or Bing would be presented with another opportunity to grab a bigger share from the current market leader.

Search engines comprise the largest digital advertising market raking in $50bn in 2013, with a growth rate of around 10 percent a year.