Bartz: Yahoo’s Search Decline Due To Dead Toolbar Deals

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says the company’s recent search market share declines are due, in part, to the loss of toolbar deals with HP and Acer computers. She made the comments during a keynote presentation today at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York City.

Late last year, Acer dropped Yahoo as its primary search provider and switched to Google. HP made Bing (well, Live Search at that time) the default search toolbar on its computers earlier this year. Before you decide that it’s farfetched for deals like this to have a noticeable impact on Yahoo’s search share, consider that the Wall Street Journal estimated earlier this year that losing those two toolbar deals could cost Yahoo 15% of its search traffic.

Bartz also thanked golfer Tiger Woods for helping send more traffic to Yahoo properties. “God bless Tiger” is how the WSJ quotes her. Bartz told the conference that Woods’ recent personal problems have boosted traffic to Yahoo’s sports portal, plus its news, gossip, and home pages.

PaidContent also recaps Bartz’s keynote today, touching on the company’s possible sale of HotJobs, Yahoo’s plans for local, and more. The recap from Silicon Alley Insider covers Bartz’ comments on display ads, video, and content paywalls.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.