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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!
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?
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.
doesn't Bing supply yahoo's search results now? so it is.. literally Bing -- right?
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.
Yahoo *is* Bing, actually, as far as the search engine backend goes.
And Bing really is a search engine backend
[rimshot]
You're right, but probably Microsoft wasn't interested in paying them while Yahoo! was.
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.
Google doesn't have to crush Firefox. The shitty arrogant Firefox developers are doing that on their own.
Yes, but there are rumblings of them trying to launch their own engine again. http://searchenginewatch.com/a...
Yahoo's never been effective at writing their own search engine; they were powered by Google up until 2004, and before that Inktomi. In 2004 they tried their own engine for the first time, but it sucked. In 2009 they cut a deal with Bing.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
Funny; FF has been my default browser for almost a decade now. Why? The plugins and the ability to control it all myself. Chrome/Chromium are too tied to the mothership for me -- and I say that as someone who uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS.
That said, if NoScript starts working on Chrome, I'd likely switch eventually -- and no, NoScripts isn't a real replacement.
when I felt my gmail was violating my privacy, and adding bloat I never asked for.
LOL:
When you use Yahoo Mail, our automated systems scan and analyze your communications and also the content sent and received from your account to detect, among other things, certain words and phrases (we call them “keywords”) within these communications. In addition to using the keywords to show you contextually relevant content and ads, these keywords may also contribute to our understanding of things that interest you. These interest categories are displayed in Ad Interest Manager.
Umm, if you chose it for "privacy" you probably made the wrong choice.
Something felt wrong about it. I looked and Yahoo was the only one that still seemed to be human.
Seriously? yahoo? The yahoo that appends text adds to the bottom of your emails? The one with the slow, counter intuitive purple UI ?
It looks like you are experiencing a sensation.
Would you like help?
_Get help with experiencing the sensation.
_Just experience the sensation without help.
_Don't show me this tip again.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
>Went Chrome years ago and have not looked back.
Then your opinion is basically worthless.
I've actually tried Firefox out regularly and noticed that for all the bluster of your average Slashdot sycophant, Firefox is actually getting good enough that I no longer care which browser I'm using. In fact I can't remember much of value coming down the pipe from Chrome, even counting the web video stuff. Firefox may be bleeding some users due to a lengthy period of retrofitting and revamping, but the real reason they'll die is because they can't get a foothold in the mobile market - Google doesn't allow Android devices to be bundled with another browser by default, and Apple and Microsoft don't even let another browser engines run on theirs.
But don't let reality weigh you down. It's trendy to bash on Firefox, after all.
why would you want your employees OFF of Firefox. What else would you have them use?
Chrome? I don't know about you but I HATE chrome on my networks. People bring in all kinds of stuff. They have all the major browser hijacks at home, it autoinstalls the toolbars/searchengines and what not at work too. fun.
IE? Do we need to discuss IE? lolz
I'm to the point, especially with the amount of malware coming through via ads, to push everyone ONTO Firefox and adblock.
If your CEO is so easily pissed off, he can't change his search engine, like in IE, I imagine your life is hell.
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
I use Firefox in preference to Chrome because of the superior and more permissive add on ecosystem, fine grained JavaScript controls, better tools for privacy protection and better (yes, really) memory management for my browsing habits.
Just the fact that I can have hassle free ad blocking on Android makes it worthy of consideration.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
just prefix the search with !g for google, https://duck.co/help/features/...
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!"
The main advantage of Firefox has always been the add-on system, and these aren't getting ported to ARM. They're all x86. They're even having problem convincing add-on makers to recompile them for x64 version of the browser which is why it has remained a non-starter so far. ARM recompiling is basically "not going to happen" land, which means that Firefox on phones is just another browser that has no advantages over most of the other ones.
This is false. Firefox addons are interpreted Javascript, not compiled code. They work the same on all FF browsers. On Linux we've been running 64-bit for many years with no addon problems.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
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.
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.
is that this is true:
"This is the most significant partnership for Yahoo in five years."
tone
DDG uses a multitude of sources for it's results, like Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, and others (it will directly pull stuff from Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, etc) including it's own crawler. So no, it's not just a front end for someone else's results, it's more of an aggregator with a focus on privacy/anonymity.
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?
Why would Google want to crush Firefox? What motive does it have?
No, but the way Google is creating a mono-culture, creating chrome-only services (only porting to other browser later), and increasingly rolling features out to the web around the standard bodies (I hangout a guy who works on web components at Mozilla); maybe Google is increasingly becoming a problem for the open web... (maybe not intentionally, but still going too big)
Mono-cultures are bad. With different default search deals in multiple geographical regions, Mozilla is not only diversifying it's revenue stream, it's also not supporting a single global mono-culture.
I thought mozilla was not for profit, so who's getting the money ?
Not for profit means "not for profit", not "no revenue". There's still programmers to employ, accounts to be done, servers to be paid for etc etc.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Okay smart guy, where in Chrome can I change my Network settings to use a Proxy server? Oh wait, I have to change IE settings to do this. Chrome pulls many settings from the same exact resource as IE. I can add a few customer extensions, which is why I said it's a glorified IE.
Before your next attempt at trolling with a personal attack, at least attempt to learn what the fuck you are talking about.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.