Firefox Google Search Box Traffic Bigger than Bing Altogether

There’s been a lot of talk about Bing’s rather solid performance of late. Microsoft’s latest search engine has steadily gained market share and has been generally well received. But every once in a while some new numbers pop up showing just how much ahead Google is. According to data from advertising network Chitika, there are more searches coming from the Firefox search box than Bing sees in total in a month.

Bing has an 8.56 percent share of the search market, as measured by Chitika, while Google searches coming from Firefox account for 9.18 percent. In total, Google has about 82.45 percent of the market. The data also shows Yahoo having a smaller share than Bing, 6.69 percent. The vast majority of analytics companies agree that Yahoo is bigger than Bing, at least in the US. However, these numbers come from across the company’s advertising network and are based on 14.5 million impressions.

Firefox unlikely to switch to Bing as default search engine

Even if the numbers may not be extremely accurate or representative, they do raise an interesting point. Google clearly gets a lot of traffic from Firefox. If Microsoft could tap into that and make Bing the default search option in the open-source browser, it would be a huge victory and certainly worth a lot of money for the company.

Unfortunately for Bing, Mozilla has made it very clear that it has no intention of changing the default search engine in Firefox. In fact, Bing is not even an option, by default Firefox allows you to chose between Google - the first option - and Google. In some markets though, Yahoo is the first option, but Mozilla says this depends on the popularity of the search engine in that particular country and not on how much Yahoo or Google are paying.

Add to this Mozilla’s rather strong anti-Microsoft feelings, Firefox was created as the Internet Explorer killer after all, and it’s very unlikely that Google will be dislodged from its privileged position.

There’s one thing that could work in Microsoft’s favor though, Google and Mozilla are becoming increasingly adversarial, despite what both companies claim. Google Chrome continues to eat away at Firefox’s market share. Google, obviously, is the default search engine for Chrome, though you get a chance to change it the first time the browser loads.