Google is losing ground as rival search engines grow

Mozilla’s move to make Yahoo default search engine, among other things, have led to Google’s search dominance being reduced

The 'take down' requests to the world's biggest internet search engine came after a European Court ruling on Tuesday (Getty Images)

Soon, we might “Bing” for information rather than Google it. The latter’s dominance of the search engine market is being reduced, with its share of the market falling the most since 2009.

Much of the traffic is being taken from Yahoo, which has seen its highest share for five years, according to new data from StatCounter. But Bing is still bigger than Yahoo, with 12.5% of searches.

Google still has a huge dominance of the market, with 77.3% of searches in November. But that fell to 75.2% in December, its lowest since StatCounter started tracking search statistics in July 2008.

Much of that drop was driven by Yahoo’s new partnership with Mozilla, StatCounter said. In November Mozilla said that it would use Yahoo as the default search in its browser rather than Google.

"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 internet usage in the US, according to Statcounter.