Yahoo, already a very distant second in the search engine popularity race, appears on the brink of losing even more of its market share as deals which would have kept Yahoo as the default search on two computer companies’ models were not renewed.
The company failed to renew deals with Hewlett-Packard and Acer to have its toolbar on the companies’ products, which one expert close to the situation says could cost the company as much as 3 percent of its market share, according to Dow Jones Wires.
In statistics gathered from comScore last month, Yahoo held 20.6 percent of the search market share in February – a 0.4 percent drop from the previous month and well below Google’s lead of 63.3 percent.
Although the lack of deals with HP and Acer is expected to decrease the company’s market share the news for Yahoo could get even worse as Microsoft appears ready to launch a campaign to boost its presence in the search world.
The software giant – which holds 8.2 percent of the market share, according to comScore – is expected to spend upwards of $100 million to promote its new search engine starting within the next few months.
In addition, Microsoft signed a deal with HP which replaced the Yahoo toolbar with its Live Search on all their computers at the beginning of this year.
