As a rough napkin calculation, Firefox has 25% of the market share. So, roughly, 25% of Google's revenue comes from FF users. That's ~ $7.5BB annually. Now, as to how many of those users would manually choose to use Google for search, I don't think anyone can say for sure (although I'm sure Google has made a good estimate). Suffice to say, Google clearly sees it as worth their while to pony up and keep those users directed towards them by default.
Woah, big leaps here. First, just because firefox has 25% of the browser market share most certainly does not mean that they provide 25% of google searches! What about all the searches through google's homepage, mobile, custom site search, etc, etc. A lot of people still use the homepage (I know, not very many amongst the tech savvy).
Secondly, whilst most of google's income is advertising, not all of it is income from advertising on their main search results page- doubleclick, adwords, etc, etc. Lots more stuff there.
I would place it for a rough guess AT MOST 10% of google's income comes from firefox.
The default Firefox home page (about:home) is a branded Google search. Combine that and the Firefox search box and I would bet you cover 90% of the searches Firefox users do.
Anyway, even if it is 10% it doesn't change the outcome substantially - it drops the revenue to $3-4 billion instead of over $7 billion. Either way it is worth paying $300 million for.
Sorry, by homepage I meant typing in "www.google.com" and searching from there. Or typing google into the search bar and then getting to google, and typing the query there. Believe it or not, a lot of people still search these ways.
But yeah, def still worth it, I was just questioning the "25% of google's income" claim.
According to this [April 2010 - but I don't think firefox's market share has actually changed a lot since then], 82% of the search market is google, and 9.18% of the search market is searches from firefox via google. That puts firefox at 11% of google's searches. I think then about 8-9% of google income would be a good estimate- couldn't quickly find any data on what % of their income comes from search, but http://www.coastdigital.co.uk/news/google-gives-breakdown-of... shows that it def isn't 100%.
As a rough napkin calculation, Firefox has 25% of the market share. So, roughly, 25% of Google's revenue comes from FF users. That's ~ $7.5BB annually. Now, as to how many of those users would manually choose to use Google for search, I don't think anyone can say for sure (although I'm sure Google has made a good estimate). Suffice to say, Google clearly sees it as worth their while to pony up and keep those users directed towards them by default.