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.

Google now has Chrome, though, and it doesn't have to share search-ad revenue from that browser with anybody but itself. Yahoo, meanwhile, has ambitions to reclaim its former prominence in Web search.


Yahoo showed a preview of a revamped search interface that Firefox users in the US will start seeing in December.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
"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," Mayer said. "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."
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/in-major-shift-firefox-to-use-yahoo-search-by-default-in-us/