• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 8, 2015

As many predict, Google's pedestal continues to weaken and could be feeling some effects from the recent loss of a search deal with Mozilla Firefox.

Google's piece of the U.S. search market fell to 75.2% in December from 79.3% in the year ago month, while Yahoo rose to 10.4% from 7.4%, according to analytics firm StatCounter.

StatCounter cites Yahoo's deal with Mozilla, which began in December, as the contributing force. Yahoo is now the default search experience for Firefox 34 in the U.S., bringing an end to Mozilla's 10-year relationship with Google. It's the lowest recorded market share for Google since StatCounter Global Stats began tracking global search statistics in July 2008.

David Rodnitzky, CEO and co-founder of 3Q Digital, predicts Google will deliver disappointing quarterly results as a result of declining desktop search and AdSense revenue. He points to alternative factors contributing to the decline like the rise of mobile and Facebook Audience Network, but the chicken (searches) can't hatch the egg (click on paid search advertisements) if consumers go elsewhere to research products and services.

"For desktop search, this is just a continuation of a trend," Rodnitzky said, in an unrelated discussion. "Consumers are shifting more and more time to mobile and tablet, as well as apps, so volume will continue to drop on desktop search. AdSense revenue will be impacted by the Facebook Audience Network (FAN) stealing publishers from Google. Mobile and social media growth at the expense of desktop traffic will also negatively impact AdSense."

Yahoo's mobile first strategy will continue to take a chunk from Google, but others predict companies like Bing, which has plans to introduce an AdSense rival this year, and adMarketplace will take more chunks.

Last year, David Pann, GM for the search network at Microsoft, told Search Marketing Daily that Microsoft has plans to build out a third-party ad publisher network, similar to Google AdSense, placing premium ads on publisher sites supported by Bing and Bing Ads.  

"Scale with money" photo from Shutterstock.