Google To Lose Search Market Share In Russia

Google has been the default search engine company for the Mozilla Firefox browser.  This is mainly due to Google’s financial support of Mozilla.  In 2006, Google paid Mozilla about $57 million which amounted to 85% of their revenue.  But now the Russian version of Firefox will be dropping Google as the default browser and switch it to Google’s Russian rival Yandex.

According to a blog post by Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson, Russian Firefox users “wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds” based on studying trends of Firefox Yandex builds.  For the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds, Yandex will become the default search engine.  This version will be released in the next few weeks.

In the last few months, Yandex was planning on going IPO, but postponed it until the economy recovers.  Yandex gets about 50 million searches per day.

[Via Webware & TechCrunch]

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