Yahoo, OpenAI interested in buying Chrome if US court asks Google to sell it

As the US Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed Google to divest Chrome web browser to restore competition to the online search market, both Yahoo and OpenAI have shown interest in buying the go-to browser for many, Google Chrome, as per reports.

The hearing at a US federal court is expected to conclude on May 9.

According to Murthy Grandhi, company profiles analyst at GlobalData, with Google Chrome accounting for nearly two-thirds of the global browser market, the implications of a forced sale for Alphabet's business model and stock valuation are profound. As per reports, Chrome has a market valuation of $20 billion or so.

The tech giant held 91.7% of the market in 2023, far ahead of competitors like Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, a report said on Tuesday. 

Microsoft, which first introduced artificial intelligence (AI) to its Bing search engine in an effort to compete with Google in the search engine market, held only 3% of the market share, according to Techopedia.com.

Other search engines, like Yandex (1.5%), Yahoo (1.2%), Baidu (1.1%), and DuckDuckGo (0.5%), had smaller market shares. 

The report said that the US was the top source of the traffic to Google.com, with 26.7%, while India (4.6%), Brazil (4.4%), the UK (3.9%), and Japan (3.9%) were other major contributors.