Yahoo! Inc.’s share price down, to become default search engine of the Firefox browser under the terms of a five-year contract with Mozilla Corp.

Yahoo! Inc. managed to strike a five-year contract with Mozilla Corp., which would make it the default search engine on the Firefox browser in the U.S. This puts an end to the unprofitable partnership with Google Inc.

The Chief Executive Officer of the company, Marissa Mayer, revealed in a statement, cited by Bloomberg: “At Yahoo, we believe deeply in search – it’s an area of investment, opportunity and growth for us. This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and also gives us an opportunity to work closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate more broadly in search, communications and digital content.”

Ms. Mayer has recently been recently seeking more partnerships for the company in order to boost the traffic and revenues of the Web portal. However, the Chief Executive Officer, who took over Yahoo two years ago, did not manage to boost the companys major ad business. The collaboration with Firefox is considered a necessary step in order to lure a large number of new users towards Yahoos search engine.

The deal between Yahoo and Mozilla comes just before the launch of the new search engines design, which is to be presented in December.

Yahoo signed a deal with Microsoft in 2009, under the terms of which it was provided with a search technology through the Bing platform. The contract has been reported to run for 10 years, with the possibility of an early break.

The search service of Yahoo has recently been under pressure. The company announced that its revenue generated from search, excluding commissions paid to its partners, represented 39% of the companys total revenue and amounted to $450 million during the third fiscal quarter.

Yahoo! Inc. was down 2.26% to close at $50.58 per share yesterday, marking a one-year increase of 46.06%. The company is valued at $49.03 billion. According to CNN Money, the 33 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Yahoo! Inc. have a median target of $50.00, with a high estimate of $63.00 and a low estimate of $38.00. The median estimate represents a -1.15% decrease from the last price of $50.58.