Google Search Share Stung By Firefox Switch

Google’s share of US search traffic has declined by more than two percent, falling from 77.5 percent in November to 75.3 percent in December.

The statistics from market research firm Statcounter, which exclude traffic from mobile devices, suggest Google has been affected by the recent loss of a search deal with Firefox which has switched to using Yahoo as the de facto search engine for its browser.

Google Search loses out to Yahoo

As a result, Yahoo’s market share for search traffic has jumped up to 10 percent, a two percent rise from November’s 8 percent.

Further reports that claim Apple may drop Google on its Safari browser also spell trouble for Google Search and its market share. Safari is the default browser on iPhones and iPads, and Statcounter estimated that 54 percent of all US mobile traffic was from Safari in December, but just 41 percent of mobile traffic was from Google Browsers such as Chrome.

Google also faces heated competition in the cloud world. A recent survey of 112 CIOs conducted by Piper Jaffray found that Google’s cloud platform was among the least desirable public cloud platform out there.

Amazon Web Services was the most popular choice, with 35 percent of CIOs preferring the service. Microsoft Azure was in second place with 21 percent, and Rackspace garnered 16 percent.

However, Google Cloud was preferred by just 7 percent of the CIOs quizzed, down from 12 percent the previous year.

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