Yahoo Supplants Google As Firefox Default Search Engine In 5 Year Agreement With Mozilla

The past couple of years have been pretty good to Yahoo's search business, but there's no doubt that the company isn't too pleased about Google's continued domination. With a new major partnership between it and Mozilla, though, the company's growth in search is sure to continue - perhaps at an even more accelerated rate.

With this new five-year partnership, Mozilla ends its previous partnership with Google, which lasted an impressive ten years. Financial terms have not been mentioned, but Yahoo's Marissa Meyer is excited about the deal, and what it will lead to.

"At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search – it’s an area of investment and opportunity for us. It’s also a key growth area for us - we’ve now seen 11 consecutive quarters of growth in our search revenue on an ex-TAC basis. This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and gives us an opportunity to work even more closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate in search, communications, and digital content. I’m also excited about the long-term framework we developed with Mozilla for future product integrations and expansion into international markets."

Beginning in December, US-based Firefox users will begin to see an overhauled search, while regular Yahoo users will see the changes reflected in early 2015. Apparently, Yahoo's developers worked closely with Mozilla in this redesign, with the goal of making it clean, modern, and immersive.

It's unclear at this point if Yahoo's search will suddenly become default if someone has an alternate chosen, but hopefully that won't be the case. It does seem likely however that if you never changed the default search engine, you'll begin seeing Yahoo automatically.

It will be interesting to see how this partnership affects Yahoo's search over the next six months to a year. If Mayer's right on the money, the future looks bright.