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Yahoo says its Mozilla Firefox deal sent search volume to a ‘five-year high’

Image Credit: Scott Schiller/Flickr

Five months ago Yahoo struck a landmark deal with Mozilla. Today, we get to see the results. Sort of.

In its first quarter earnings report, Yahoo revealed that its total search volume during the past quarter reached “a five-year high.”

“The partnership between Yahoo and Mozilla was key to this volume increase,” the company said in a statement.

We already knew Yahoo’s search market share had grown: In little more than a month the company grabbed 1.6 percent of U.S. search market share from Google (according to ComScore), and later snagged 1.2 percent more. The company now holds an estimated 13 percent share of the entire U.S. desktop search market.

Meanwhile, depending on Yahoo’s accounting tricks, search revenue either rose 20 percent or slipped slightly when compared to the first quarter of 2014. For this past quarter, Yahoo saw gross search revenue hit $956 million, GAAP search revenue hit $532 million, and ex-Tac search revenue slip to $432 million.

In case you’re not an accountant, it’s noteworthy that the GAAP standard refers to “generally accepted accounting principles,” and ex-Tac reflects search revenue minus traffic acquisition costs.

We still don’t have a super-clear view of how Yahoo’s search business will perform in the long term, but the Mozilla deal is an interesting development — as is Yahoo’s new search deal with Microsoft.

For more on Yahoo’s Q1 2015, head here.

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