Yahoo! clawing back market share from Google?

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If the latest figures from traffic-trackers comScore are correct, it would appear that Yahoo! is slowly but surely clawing back some of Google’s utter dominance of the search sector, in the USA at least.

After many years of decline, Yahoo!’s search numbers have been increasing now for six months in a row, and in January they jumped up half a percentage point to 21%. Simultaneously, Google dropped half a percent to 63%.

It’s great news for Yahoo!, because it means that despite the acquisition dance around the company last year hasn’t had any negative effect on their core offering at all. Meanwhile, MSN Live Search is languishing at 8.5%, while Microsoft pours money into it, and Cuil is nowhere to be seen.

Internet Explorer browser usage dives below 70%, Firefox hits 20%

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It’s no secret that internet browser Firefox has been one of the shining lights of the open source movement, taking market share from Microsoft in a way that Linux hasn’t ever quite been able to. Well, in November last year, usage of Internet Explorer dipped below 70% for the first time in a decade, and Firefox’s market share rose above 20%.

At its peak in 2003, Internet Explorer was running on nearly 94.5% of the world’s internet-using computers. Since then, however, usage has steadily declined, due to endless bugs and security vulnerabilities leading to poor public perception of the software.