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Firefox Signs Five-Year Deal With Yahoo, Drops Google as Default Search Engine
mpicpp writes with news that Yahoo will soon become the default search engine in Firefox. Google's 10-year run as Firefox's default search engine is over. Yahoo wants more search traffic, and a deal with Mozilla will bring it. In a major departure for both Mozilla and Yahoo, Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States. "I'm thrilled to announce that we've entered into a five-year partnership with Mozilla to make Yahoo the default search experience on Firefox across mobile and desktop," Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post Wednesday. "This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years." The change will come to Firefox users in the US in December, and later Yahoo will bring that new "clean, modern and immersive search experience" to all Yahoo search users. In another part of the deal, Yahoo will support the Do Not Track technology for Firefox users, meaning that it will respect users' preferences not to be tracked for advertising purposes. With millions of users who perform about 100 billion searches a year, Firefox is a major source of the search traffic that's Google's bread and butter. Some of those searches produce search ads, and Mozilla has been funded primarily from a portion of that revenue that Google shares. In 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, that search revenue brought in the lion's share of Mozilla's $311 million in revenue.
Bing!
still better than bing
Let's see if Yahoo can use the additional funds to improve their search quality, then maybe we can have at least two choices for each search (not counting metasearch engines).
I switch the default on every install anyway, so ... *shrug*
Once upon a time, when we talked about things like "Web Portals," and people knew who Jerry Yang was, Yahoo! was cool, and offered a lot of useful curating and information. Also some good times playing hearts and backgammon on Yahoo! games.
Then there was babel fish.
Then there was Google beta.
Then Deja News was no more.
And now Yahoo! is cool again?
Really? Yahoo? Why not BING?
So if two listing, burning ships strap themselves together, do they float better? Or do they just sink faster? It seems to me that if your browser market-share is dropping and you're losing relevance, the best move is probably not to attach yourself to a search engine whose market share and relevance were lost years ago.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this
If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.
Now that Google has every reason to crush Firefox, what is Mozilla's market share going to be in 2019? I sense a poll coming up.
I just don't even know how to feel right now...
I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.
Yahoo won me back as my primary email when I felt my gmail was violating my privacy, and adding bloat I never asked for. Something felt wrong about it.
I looked and Yahoo was the only one that still seemed to be human.
At least they didn't choose DuckDuckGo - one of the worst search engines I've ever used.
You're right, but probably Microsoft wasn't interested in paying them while Yahoo! was.
Who uses the default search engine anyway?
firefox is trying to go the way of Netscape navigator. Getting more irreverent with each month that passes. Went Chrome years ago and have not looked back.
Google Search sucks the last few years.
I currently know zero tech people still using Firefox. The ones I know that are still using Firefox are the non techies which were advised to use Firefox instead of IE (at least on Windows) before Chrome existed, and that kept using it because of.. inertia. The future is not bright for Firefox.
Interesting that more companies are moving away form Google. A couple months ago, RealNetworks (ya, reliable I know) changed it's default 2nd party offer from Google / Chrome to Ask. (Fun for the day: use Ask search and search for Ask toolbar ... examine the results).
... Google works fine. However ... frequently Google will substitute terms (that don't belong), add obvious sales links (that don't apply), or have a referral to a second level search (which has always useless: best example is returning searches for an items from eBay -- if I wanted eBay I would search eBay). Google's image search(method) is much better than Bing's ... but is there a viable option "B" general text / info search?
For me, it is getting harder to use Google search, especially if I want to search for more than two words. For simple searches
I don't think Yahoo actually wants to be a search engine. I think they just want people to look at their ads.
By partnering with a browser: they can run searches through Google's servers but strip the Google Adword adds and replace them with Yahoo Ads. The best part is Google has to pay the electricity bill for the datacenter and Yahoo can fire their entire search engine team and stick to their core competency: adding zero value(rather than their negative value proposition as a search engine.
Mozilla users shouldn't care as long as the difference in appearance is transparent to them and Yahoo doesn't start fucking up the Google brand by "cutting" the blue magic. If Yahoo get's greedy and can't keep it in their pants with nearly equal revenues to Google(and no operating expenses) then they deserve to fail.
That this change just gave me the leverage I needed to take all of our employees of FireFox. Thanks for pissing my CEO off and making my job easier, Mozilla!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"At least they didn't choose DuckDuckGo - I love the google anal probe too much"
Definitely not "dead easy", but quite doable if you are only somewhat technical and sufficiently intrepid.
This appears to me to be very intentional as it will appease those who actually care (such as /. readers) and (like /. readers) capable of both finding (via google, of course) and implementing the change and also capable of both understanding and ignoring the very creepy warnings about damaging the browser functionality. (In other words, a tiny portion of Firefox users.)
I use Firefox for Ghostery and Noflash and also don't like being dictated to about which search engine I use.
- Leonard
In other news, Libre browesers like icecat, Iceweasel, and Abrowser offer search engines.like DuckDuckGo and Blekko. Wolfram Alpha comes in handy on ocassion. You don't have to live in a Google/Yahoo!/Bing! world. May myriads of search engines bloom in a more diverse interweb.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
There, fixed that title for you /. editors
I switched my default search to ddg about 6 months ago. The results aren't as good as google, but 90% of the time it's good enough. Google is bookmarked when I need it.
Then again I use Chrome, don't remember exactly why but Firefox pissed me off enough to make the change about 2 years ago.
Oh mobile /., how useful a preview comment would be
Google was paying Mozilla before for traffic driven their way, that will presumably end now.
So if I'm using Firefox and switch back to Google (because I don't want to use reskinned Bing), Mozilla won't be getting anything anymore.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I liked BabelFish...
English -> English was my first proxy back in school ;-P
LOL! I haven't looked for browser usage stats in ages, but I just found these ones: http://caniuse.com/usage_table.php
Firefox is only at about 10% of the market now on the desktop. But Firefox for Android? LOL, it's 0.15%! Hilarious!
LOL, Chrome 37 is at 15.73%, which probably puts it over Firefox. Chrome 38 is at 12.39%, which also probably puts it over Firefox.
Chrome for Android by itself, at 9.51%, almost has more users than Firefox does in total!
This is funny, funny, FUNNY! Individual versions of Chrome have more users than all versions of Firefox on all platforms!
Google didn't lose out on anything here. If anyone's the big loser, I suspect it's Yahoo. They're paying good money to get the attention of pretty much nobody!
People who use Chrome are like AOL users. Like wearing a t-shirt which says "I'm an idiot". Thank you for that. You are an idiot for using software by an ad broker which sells you as a product.
It redirects to zoo.com now, metacrawler used to be a cool search tool.
<tt>This is great. I was looking for a reason to switch back to Firefox.</tt>
The World is Yours.
But I think Google cut Mozilla out of some revenue sharing thing. It doesn't look like there was much choice.
This is not the case... I was the internal meeting at Mozilla earlier today, and it was made very clear that all options (including Google) had stronger economic terms (than the current deal).
So it wasn't because Google cut Mozilla out.
See the official announcement too:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
Personally, I see how this can only foster more competition, less monoculture and thus a better web.
Then Netscape said to Firefox: "You and me, we've got nowhere to go but up!"
I feel bad for them. Unless you are particularly Google-averse, you are going to switch any web browser defaults to Google search. Most people that download Firefox are savvy enough to change their search providers. Unless Google were not willing to extend the partnership, this is probably a grave error. I hope they negotiated an out clause, or a separate revenue sharing agreement for those that switch Search Providers.
I've been using Linux Mint lately, and fucking up my system royally. So I've had to fall back on the LiveUSB installation to repair the system. Mint doesn't get a financial kickback from Google, so they ship Yahoo! as the default search engine instead. This has led me, by accident, to use Yahoo! a few times when looking for information.
I'm not saying that I would rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than use Yahoo! search; that wouldn't make my system boot. Was it worth it to continually type in 'google' and hit Ctrl+Enter before entering a search query? Yes, every single time, and I deeply regretted each lapse in memory. The only reason Firefox might care about Google is if they care about the quality of their search results.
For me, as a web developer, even though the built-in tools in Chrome and Firefox have come a long way since 2006, I still prefer debugging in Firebug, and installing Adblock Plus, NoScript, and Tree Style Tabs. Firefox is my web browser of choice. However, Google is still my search engine of choice, and having one without the other is a serious issue for me. I hope that I will remember every time to go to google.com when I need to search for information, but every time I forget, I am sure that I will curse this deal.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I've used Firefox for a long time now but it seems like Mozilla is doing everything it can to drive me to another browser. Ads, Yahoo/Bing, playing politics with their CEOs, these things annoy me. I've fought against moving to Chrome but it's getting harder and harder to avoid the switch.
Note the specific language being used.
"Yahoo will support the Do Not Track technology for Firefox users, meaning that it will respect users' preferences not to be tracked for advertising purposes."
The Do Not Track tag clearly specifies that the user does not want to be tracked. However, Yahoo is twisting its meaning such that the user is not tracked for advertising purposes. Two very different things. Unfortunately, despite considerable effort, there is no standardized meaning for Do Not Track. All too often, corporations invent new meanings for those simple three words in order to continue making a profit by tracking users who have explicitly indicated not wanting to be tracked. So much for notice and choice.
Firefox sucks.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If you run a restaurant, and you serve soft drinks, you can serve Coca-Cola Products or Pepsi products.
Many years ago (before 1997) some restaurant chains objected to Pepsi products because Pepsi owned restaurant chains including Pizza Hut and KFC, and cross promoted its drinks with the restaurants.
Back then Pepsi would pay restaurants to use their products in stead of Coke. So they were able to overcome some of the competitive objections to using their products. Coke never paid.
In the late 90s, Pepsi solved the problem by a corporate separation of the restaurants and the drinks. The restaurant company is now called Yum! Brands. I assume they stopped paying restaurants to take their products.
To me Google vs Yahoo resembles the Coke vs. Pepsi situation. And, it is just as important.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Default...
Easy enough to change it back to Google.
Let me predict the future a little here. Yahoo will realize that everyone with a brain, aka a portion of Firefox users, will immediately switch to Google as the default. That will be followed by either Mozilla locking it in and dropping to 0.0001% market share or Yahoo pulling out because it's not profitable and Google not taking them back, resulting in a drop to 0.0001% market share due to the company self destructing.
oh wait, doh!
Firefox, with its marketing deals and in-browser ads is no longer "it". It would be great to have an independent project driver by developer enthusiasm rather than anyone's business needs. Linux kernel and many other projects manage that somehow. Only then the software can do uncompromisingly right things for users and web developers. Why silently pick one search engine when query can be submitted to several in parallel and user given a quick tool to compare results?
On developer side, we need a truly great and modern language rather then ever more arcane Javascript libraries and optimization engines.
Why would Google want to crush Firefox? What motive does it have?
Firefox is an open-source browser that poses zero threat to any of Google's businesses. It can't be used in the same way IE was to limit competition. There will always be some people who aren't using Chrome. If they can't have everyone using Chrome, the next best thing is putting Google on as many browsers as possible. Chrome is all about making it easier for people to use their services, the browser itself is not that important.
A good chunk of Firefox user are people who've had it installed for them before Chrome existed and have just stuck with it. These are the kinds of people who would use the Firefox default search without noticing a change. Firefox still has ~20% market share, it might make a difference.
DuckDuckGo reportedly uses the Russian search engine Yandex as its back end. Is there an advantage to using DuckDuckGo over just using Yandex directly?
If I mistype, so be it tell me so. It is usually one character so is easier to fix then look through the garbage from the search engine.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
So if two listing, burning ships strap themselves together, do they float better?
yes they become a ghetto catamaran.
But make sure they're aligned properly when you tie them together. Otherwise, you end up with not a catamaran but a katamari, which doesn't float quite as well.
Yahoo has been terribly managed, and Mozilla Foundation is rapidly getting worse.
It appears that Mozilla Foundation is trying to discourage the use of the Thunderbird email client. The newest version of Thunderbird, 31.2.0, has the Save-As bug. All file saves are Save As, and suggest a different file name than saved before.
Other obvious bugs were introduced. For example, the fields for email addresses are much more difficult to read. The Save-As bug has been reported, but no new version has been released.
If many windows and tabs are open for a long time, Firefox now crashes in a way that does not cause a crash report to be sent.
That's a poor decision on Mozilla's part.
I still use Firefox primarily, and most IT people I know do the same. Chrome is glorified IE that runs in Linux too.. big whoop I don't wanna use it because I have very little trust for Google or MS. Opera is my 2nd favorite, but can be bothersome for certain tasks. Firefox used to be a friendly thing for Google, but Google now pushes their own browser..their prerogative, I don't mean that as an insult.
So Firefox defaults to Yahoo.. no biggie. I can turn that off as easily as I can change IE to something other than Bing. If I could not do that, it would be a problem.. as it is.. it's just a minor inconvenience I'm willing to accept. If they fund Firefox better, so be it. Yahoo's their own company too and can make their own choice (though I won't use them either, except for burner test accounts)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
is that this is true:
"This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years."
tone
The plugins are indeed dynamically loaded libraries that need to be compiled for the same architecture as the browser itself in order to be loaded.
Why can't a 64-bit Firefox communicate with a 32-bit plugin-container.exe?
Firefox's default search engine is switching from Google to Yahoo in the United States.
So clearly, Firefox have agreed on $$$$$$ sum from Yahoo.
My question is, considering the project is "open source", who receives the money?
Wait, no love for webcrawler? Ask Jeeves?
Imagine everyone loving everyone, love in the air, peace. It's possible in our lifetime. All we need is one cross platform development environment! The web! But no. Alas. It is not to be. We will live in a fractured universe for the rest of our life. Get your guns out and start shooting!
Of course Yahoo is cool. They just sucked in millions because of a bet that had nothing at all to do with current leadership. Marissa has the rest of her career to play with with no consequence.
That said, I'm very happy to see Google get a poke in the eye. Search results is their one trick pony. Attempting to build a secondary business on top of all the mostly idle infrastructure a la Amazon will not work out for them in the long run.
I thought mozilla was not for profit, so who's getting the money ? Then whats next, suggested (sponsored ) web pages, killing extensions like ad blockers and more annoyances. It just takes a second to say make chrome the default browser.
Well, given that I haven't used Yahoo for anything except yellow pages (and even that rarely) for ten years, I ask the question:
Will Yahoo even survive the five year run of this contract?
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?
Not one comment about the strategy of using different search engines per country.
Mod me down to hell if you want, but I remember when Yahoo was the big search engine. I remember seeing a friend's PC doing the smooth transitions because he had win 95's fun pack or something, and he was using Yahoo (and I kept telling him to use hotbot)
(I was still using OS/2 at the time with with win 3.11 wfw)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
In this case the real search engine on Yahoo is Bing. It will surely be 5 more years and Bing would be interested in keeping this deal going. And don't forget that Yahoo has been in talks to be bought by Microsoft before.
Lots count of their security problems, and they took days to fix HeartBleed. Yes, this move makes perfect sense. I am not entirely sure it makes a sound business decision, or it is the last coffin in the nail for me in what respects firefox. Dickheads.
Or something like that. Yahoo get's more search, Firefox users get their privacy respected.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
If you guys keep it up it's going to be Nozilla. That was how the Godzilla movie played out, I wanted a lot Mozilla.
When 95% of searches are done through Google. Its very sad that Firefox does not even make a deal with #2 Bing but with Yahoo. Barely a blip on the search
statistic. But I guess these days Yahoo search and Firefox go together. I doubt Mozilla will see nearly the revenue from the Yahoo deal as Google.
I look for Mozilla to sell out more users privacy as it tries to obtain a better revenue stream. I really am sad to see Firefox go down in flames like this. But again it seems being open source is not a good means to success. You have to have big dollars and big revenue support and the end user simply has never fully supported open source with their wallets.
My default browser is firefox and sometimes i use chrome and rarely i use opera. Firefox is slower and buggier than chrome, it memory leaks, flash is buggy and crashes and slower, clearly inferior to chrome, search is slower. The only reason i stay with firefox is all my crap is on there, it doesnt log every piece of data as far as im aware like chrome does. I also have used all the browsers on android and firefox is fine for me on it. I use an ipad and use only safari, its pretty decent, i wouldnt install chrome on it despite safari not allowing you to block googles ads outside of chrome. This is mostly because chrome tracks everything, and i think there should be competition. However yahoo jumping over to firefox instead of google search is backwards for firefox. Firefox wants more users, not less, and its just another reason for average user not to use firefox. Not everyone wants to piss around in the settings to change it. Its a huge fail. Firefox needs to add google chrome style predictive search bar, speed up their flash/html5 if possible, and they would be getting closer to being level with chrome, and of course not using yahoo search.
Firefox has long displayed an absolutely horrible focus in their development. What used to be the cool, slim and fast new browser on the intarwebs has become a ridiculous moloch and instead of working on that, they started berating users with things like completely breaking https access for self-signed certificates which are all too common amongst developers who are traditionally also the lion share of Firefox's users. And instead of fixing that or supporting modern web formats they went on to useless "image" and coolness campaigns and redesigned the interface I dont know how many times, as if that really mattered THAT much... and finally ended up with a cheap Chrome knock-off lock that is just disgusting.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
I have repeatedly tried to use DDG over the years and I honestly wish I could like them but as someone in Europe who at times needs more "local" results, I just really, really hate DDG. A simple search on google yields the results I was looking for down to "Shopping" which can be handy or "Maps" or "Images" results. On DDG I got results that were not even close to what I was actually looking for, no shopping and no images. I have had the same experience when searching for error messages for work or code snippets. DDG results were so atrociously off and useless, it was painful.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Firefox Signs Five-Year Deal With Yahoo, Drops Google as Default Search Engine
I agree! Something about Savannah ALWAYS annoys me. And Matt treats her like his little pet. It's gross.
Sound like two deathrow inmates holding hands while walking down the line
Is like both Yahoo and Mozilla are looking to fail
Another MASSIVE failure for open source. Remember when people used to claim that Microsoft and Apple would be killed off by open source software? LOL.
Unfortunately, I manage a network where some of the users think:
- That black box beside their desk is the "hard drive."
- The big screen is the computer.
- The administrator (me) locks their computer when they leave it alone for 5 minutes.
- Their operating system is called "Outlook."
- The internet is called "Google."
- That there is an "Any Key" on the keyboard.
- That raising and lowering an optical mouse makes it work in 3-D.
Thanks, Firefox.
Perhaps when none of the major browsers use it as the default search engine, people will start to get the idea out of their stupid heads that forcing a search engine to remove results is not the same thing as taking something off the internet. In short, Google != "The Internet".
Then perhaps we won't see more idiotic decisions like this one.
Now, what if they stop removing features not existing in Chrome just for the sake of not competing? I mean You, removers of crypto.signText...
Just for a fresh install, or does it change the default when you upgrade to a new version (every week or so)
and does this affect SeaMonkey?
But Yahoo just changed their logo recently. I thought that fixed all their problems.
Proverbs 21:19
Oh no the company who provides me a bunch of free and useful software wants to make some money by selling advertisements to try and get me to buy stuff! How in God's name am I supposed to ignore the handful of advertisements that display on the screen when I perform web searches (some of which are actually useful since they target me specifically). Oh, wait. That doesn't actually bother me at all... carry on then.
Maybe Mozilla will stop falling all over itself trying to make Firefox a clone of Google Chrome.
Didn't Firefox made their URL bar "dynamic" and shit before Google Chrome existed?, and had search in the URL bar before it itself existed (in the browser called Mozilla). That is enough. It's easy to go to google's site if you want google to guess what you are trying to type.
Good on Mozilla for getting an influx of cash, but I'll be changing the search preferences of every Firefox I install on my and my coworkers systems. Yahoo's little "no more working from home" mess was cited by our CEO as a reason to halt the practice where I work. So Yahoo can go fsck itself with a broken broomstick.
NoScript on Chrome is ScriptSafe, it works identical to noscript.
Which choice makes less money for either Microsoft or Google?
300+ posts here and no one has yet mentioned that Thunderbird has been using Microsoft(R) Bing(R) as its default search engine for some time now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Two dying companies merge...yay.
Great, another step when setting up a new install of Firefox. If only Chrome would bring back side tabs...
I'm sad at this. If they wanted to swtich, I'd have prefered Bing at the least. In term of quality search, as far as I'm concerned it goes Google->Bing->Yahoo->DuckDuckGo As an example, I was doing a search to see what are my options to check Boardgamegeek on a mobile without using the main website as it's not mobile friendly at all. So I did this search on all 4 engines: "boardgamegeek on mobile" Google and Bing showed as first result the bgg wiki page on mobile access which has all the relevant information. Yahoo, even though it's using Bing tech, never showed that search result anywhere in the first page, neither did DuckDuckGo, and their search results didn't gave me any answer I was looking for. So, useless in the case of this search. So, pretty sad that they chose Yahoo :(
I remember well altavista was the search engine of choice.
Seeing as the EU wants to force a breakup of Google over alleged monopoly, the Mozilla guys just wanted to show their support for their old sponsors.