Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has lost some of its touch. It gave up search market share to Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), which relies on search for some of its revenue. The news offers hope that Yahoo will get the benefit of search revenue as its attempts to find means to improve its digital sales under CEO Marissa Ann Mayer.

A search market share research firm reported:

In December Yahoo achieved its highest US search share for over five years according to the latest data from StatCounter, the independent website analytics provider. Google fell to the lowest monthly share yet recorded by the company. These December stats coincide with Mozilla making Yahoo the default search engine for Firefox 34 users in the US.

Thus, a Yahoo management decision may have aided its improvement. According to StatCounter:

“The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google.” Firefox users represented just over 12% of US internet usage in December according to StatCounter.

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Yahoo’s rise gives it a chance to catch Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing search engine, the performance of which has bedeviled the software company for years:

StatCounter Global Stats reports that in December Google took 75.2% of US search referrals followed by Bing on 12.5% and Yahoo on 10.4%.

Yahoo came as close as any other company to creating search on the Internet. Google took the lead in that business over a decade ago. Since then, Yahoo has struggled to improve its top line while Google’s sales have multiplied many times, and its market cap has reached $371 billion, which ranks it fourth by that yardstick among all U.S. public corporations.

As Yahoo looks to new mobile products and content to help improve its financial position, its original search business may start to help it unexpectedly.

StatCounter methodology:

StatCounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every page view referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.

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