Mozilla Firefox in Russia: DASVIDANIYA Yandex, Hello Google for default search option

Élyse Betters | Jun 7 2012 - 8:02 am PT

Mozilla’s Firefox browser will kick Yandex to the curb this winter in favor of Google as its default search option in Russia.

Yandex became the primary search engine in Russia for Firefox builds roughly three years ago, and it currently sports a 60 percent market share. Their agreement is now set to expire Dec. 31, with Google slated to take the reins. The Mountain View, Calif.-based Company maintains the lead as the world’s dominating search engine; although, it only has a meager 26.5-percent of the market share in Russia.

According to TheNextWeb:

A Yandex spokesperson says they were notified by Mozilla of the imminent change on June 1, and points out that the company will continue to develop and distribute its own Yandex-branded, customised Firefox browser (at least until the end of this year, under the terms of the aforementioned agreement).

The latter version evidently sports Yandex as the default search engine.

Yandex also says Mozilla’s decision will likely not impact its market share in Russia significantly (they estimate a 1.5 percent loss over the next few months).

[…] Yandex adds that the impact on its revenue and profitability will be negligible.

Google and Mozilla’s global, three-year deal allegedly runs around $900 million. The agreement is a win for Google, after Twitter notably teamed with Yandex in February.

The microblogging service gave the Russian search engine permission to meld its pipeline of public tweets for real-time search results. Google paired with Twitter in 2009 to offer the same function, but the Internet powerhouses failed to renew their partnership in July 2011. The search engine now prefers its own Google+ social network combined with personalized search results, rather than integrating tweets into aggregated searches.

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