Yahoo continues its efforts to make
search results more appealing to advertising and consumers to increase market share. On Wednesday the company made changes to its results exclusively available to those searching on desktops from the
Mozilla Firefox browser on Windows, Mac and Linux in the U.S.
The changes improve video and image results as well as entertainment and celebrity searches. Now when users search with Yahoo for
famous people and movies, they see a strip of related videos and images across the top of the page. The changes will become available through other browsers in time.
The new user
interface serves movie from IMDb, and movie tickets from Fandango. Adding to the video and the image results, Yahoo says it will serve music purchases links that send searchers to Apple iTunes,
business locations on TripAdvisor and reviews on Yelp, and personal photos from Flickr in search image results when the user is signed in to their account.
The move expands a five-year
relationship between Yahoo and Mozilla that began in November 2014. Yahoo pays Mozilla to serve search results. It replaced a long-standing agreement between Mozilla and Google.
Revenue from
search rose about 2% to $870 million in the third quarter of 2015, which the company reported in late October. It owns about 12.6% of search market share -- falling behind Microsoft, which owns about
20.7%, and Google, which owns 63.9%, per comScore September 2015 numbers.
comScore numbers estimate a total of 17.8 billion explicit core searches across all engines with Google sites ranking
No. 1 with 11.4 billion, up 1% from the previous month. Microsoft sites ranked No. 2 with 3.7 billion searches, up 2%, followed by Yahoo sites with 2.2 billion, Ask Network with 300 million, and AOL
with 210 million.