In a bit of news from the "damn, that's competitive" department, Google has tweaked its search results page to heavily promote its Chrome browser. That's not so bad, given that Google can do just about whatever it wants on its own search results. However, the curious bit is that Google's big announcementreally, its imploringis specifically directed toward users of Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Go ahead and try it yourself. If you have Firefox installed on your desktop or laptop system, pull up Google's search page and search for, well, anything. On the accompanying results pageassuming Google hasn't flipped its little promotional effort offyou'll get a giant box at the top that asks you to "Switch your default search engine to Google." You can click on a blue box to learn more about how to do that, or a gray box to indicate that, no, you're not interested in switching browsers at this time.

Interestingly enough, Google only appears to be targeting Firefox users with its promotion. We tried the same Google search on Internet Explorer, but didn't see anything at the top of Google's results page.

As for why Google is going after Firefox, Search Engine Land notes that Google is likely trying to lure back Firefox users as a result of Mozilla's November announcement that it was replacing Google as the browser's default search enginereplacing it with rival Yahoo, that is. According to StatCounter, Yahoo currently sits at a 10.38% market share as of February 2015, which is a bit of a bump from its 7.91% market share as of November of last year.

Google did lose market share between the same time period, dropping from 77.46 percent to 74.89% according to StatCounter's figures. That's not a huge loss, given that Google still holds a commanding lead over second-place rival Bing (currently sitting at a market share of 12.58%). Still, the loss does appear to be enough to put Google a bit on the offensive.

Today's promotion isn't the first time Google has tried to appeal to the Firefox crowdand certainly not the first time since last November. Not only does Google use its homepage to try and cajole Firefox users to get more Google-y, but it has also taken to social media (Twitter, specifically) to win over some Firefox fans.

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