During Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting, the company announced that it has entered into a partnership with Oracle to make Yahoo the default search provider for Java.
Although Google is the world's most popular search engine today, the company is certainly not running unopposed. Bing, AOL, Baidu and Yahoo are all trying their best to take a larger piece of the search engine market.
Though Microsoft's Bing can rely on the popularity of the Microsoft ecosystem of products to help it grow and expand, companies like Yahoo instead need to rely on strategic partnerships to help grow their business.
To that end, Yahoo has signed a new partnership with Oracle to make Yahoo the default search provider of Java for the next three years. The Java installer has already been updated and will now by default set your search engine, your default homepage, and your default New Tab page to Yahoo.
This only applies to users of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, however. If you are wondering why it's not true of Firefox, it's because Yahoo already has a separate agreement with Mozilla to make Yahoo its default search provider. The Yahoo/Mozilla partnership was signed back in November 2014 and will continue for at least a five year period.
According to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, the partnership with Mozilla has already been profitable for Yahoo and has dramatically increased its search distribution. Undoubtedly, this Oracle deal will help increase Yahoo's share of the search engine market further, but it might also be a bother to some users who don't know how to change their default search engine back to Google and don't like the experience of using Yahoo.
Fortunately, for those who really don't want to use Yahoo, they can simply just uncheck a box and avoid all of this entirely.
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