default search engine

Just a few years ago, Mozilla's Firefox browser was rising fast as the chief challenger to Microsoft's stubbornly dominant Internet Explorer.

Things change pretty fast in the world of Internet technology, however, and today Firefox's once bright future seems much less certain.

In 2008, Mozilla entered into a three-year partnership with Google. In exchange for remaining the default search engine on Firefox, Google hands over about 84% of Firefox's total revenue.

Well, it's 2011 now and, as ZDNet's Ed Bott points out, the status of that partnership is unclear....

Mozilla and MIcrosoft have teamed up to release a special version of Firefox that integrates Bing as the default search engine.

Whenever we write a glowing story about Firefox or Mozilla, the ExtremeTech postbag has a tendency to fill up with letters and missives from concerned readers who are worried about Mozilla’s close ties with Google.

Almost the entirety of Mozilla’s income — 97% of $104 million — arrives in the form of royalties from the Firefox search box, and the lion’s share (86%, $85 million) of those royalties are paid by the default search engine: Google.

Microsoft is going all out and doing everything humanly possible to eat into Google’s search market share. Google dropped by 1% in the month of June as Yahoo and Bing gained .6% each.

Though the drop cannot be directly tied to Bings aggressive marketing tactics just based on 1 months results, it would be interesting to see if the trend continues.

With news that Bing could replace Google a

We know that Apple and Google aren’t on very friendly terms anymore.

You can start a company with the best intentions, but when that company grows into an enormous entity like Google, it starts being so important to itself that those intentions often take a back seat to company’s ambitions.

At the end of 2005, Google made an interesting investment: $1 billion dollars for 5% of AOL.

The move made sense for AOL – it provided it with a ton of new advertising, search, and revenue opportunities via a strong partnership with Google.

Yahoo's oneSearch will be the default search engine on AT&T's MEdia Net cell phone portal, which is used on many of the company's Internet-enabled phones.