It means having to court a new search engine provider for a revenue stream after those three years are up. Such a deal may not be as favorable for them as an agreement to stick around partnered with yahoo.
After leaving Google though, what else is there for Mozilla (after Yahoo)? I seems apparent that these search deals are no longer a viable source of income for the company, future funding might become problematic. I love Mozilla, they have smart folks there so I'm sure they will work it out.
Is there any reason they can't just go back to Google? I thought they only switched to Yahoo because the contract was up and Yahoo offered a deal they couldn't walk away from.
No, they definitely could go back to Google. Problematic is just that while Google will probably pay, there's now essentially a third of the competition for that spot gone, so Google will have to pay significantly less.
Never mind also that Chrome has made leaps and bounds. I don't know the details of the history of Mozilla and Google's partnership, but featuring prominently in a major browser was probably a lot more valuable to Google back when Google didn't have a browser of its own.
It is also a bit of a conflict of interest on Google's part to support Mozilla. They have a competing app ecosystem, and while supporting the Firefox Marketplace and Chrome App Store are actually relatively simple for HTML5 apps, they probably would rather not have the competition at all.
Duckduckgo? Don't know how much cash they have to throw around, though. Certainly not as much as Yahoo or Google, but maybe it'd be enough? I hope so, anyways.
I don't think it's anywhere near; DDG probably makes somewhere in the single digits millions per year, while Mozilla earns hundreds of millions from these deals.
As a comparison, DDG is serving about 10M searches/day. Google serves that amount every 5 seconds.
I don't know anything about the inner workings of DDG, but I'd have to assume $1m/yr would be a very large outgoing for them, never mind the $300m/yr of Google or $375m/yr of Yahoo.
