Google Inc.’s dominance of the U.S. Internet search market slipped last month in the biggest drop since 2009 while Yahoo! Inc. posted its largest share gain, as the companies grappled with the fallout of a search deal on Firefox browsers.
Google’s slice of the U.S. search market fell to 75.2 percent in December from 79.3 percent a year ago, while Yahoo jumped to 10.4 percent from 7.4 percent, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That put Google at its smallest share of the U.S. Web search market since at least 2008, when StatCounter first started tracking the numbers, and the highest share for Yahoo since 2009.