Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

It was between Softbank and DoCoMo. DoCoMo commented that they were “disappointed” about the results, following the announcement by iPhone regarding the Japanese market contract with Softbank. This means that iPhone will have Yahoo search as it’s official search engine. Yahoo’s search team already developed iPhone/iPod Touch search services, which has functions to switch between iPhone/iPod Touch screen and PC screen. The functions on iPhone/iPod Touch screen have been adjusted to provide better usability and the search experiences. It also has image search function.

Yahoo Japan announced that they begun providing the contents match advertising as a part of their AdPartner services. With this service, the website owners who have Yahoo Japan ID can begin earning money from advertising displayed on their websites.

The earnings can be paid in cash or can be converted to Yahoo Points. While cash payment (wire transfer) would cost the transaction fee to the site owner, Yahoo points can be very attractive to Japanese owners as it can be used at Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Auctions, and other popular e-commerce sites.

Rakuten, one of Japan’s popular e-commerce sites and current top 3 property in Japan, and Norway’s Fast Search and Transfer announced their mobile search engine site, “Rakuten-Fast Mobile Search”. (http://m.rfms.jp)

This mobile search site use their original mobile search engine “RF Search”, which analyze the meaning of the search term (keyword), and find the pages that are most relevant to the keyword from their data base of more than 200 million page index.

It is exciting to see that Japanese companies coming up with their own search engines while many people just focus on Yahoo and Google. Japanese language is very different from Western languages, and mobile market in Japan is different from any other markets in the world. It just make sense to have Japan’s original engines. Having another engine with different algorithm (different search results) would benefit the users.

Source comScore: Yahoo! Sites continued to lead the market in Japan with more than 42 million visitors in December. Google Sites captured the second position with 32 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 30 million visitors. The top 25 properties held relatively constant in their positions from November 2007, with small position gains experienced by Sakura Internet, Mixi, Inc., and Seesaa.net.

Chinese search engine Baidu, which has 74% search share in China, has officially open its service in Japan. The Japanese version of Baidu offers web search, image search, video search and blog search services.

Baidu’s CEO Robin Li said, “We are going to add the services and the functions that meet Japanese user’s needs, and would like to make Baidu Asia’s search portal site.  We are hoping that Baidu Japan will become more popular than Yahoo and Google in Japan as we are in China.”

They plan to start offering the paid placement advertising, etc. by 2010.

I’m not sure if or when Baidu will become one of the main search engines in Japan, but this definitely makes the search engine landscape in Japan very interesting in up coming months.

It’s a well known fact that Yahoo Japan has been the most visited site in Japan for years, which is still the case, but we may see Google stealing the position in near future as Google became No. 2 most visited site for the first time in late 2007.

According to Nielsen Japan’s report, Google ranked at #14 back in December 2005. It is a rare case for a site to improve the ranking in such a short period of time. Considering that the ranking is based on the number of access to the site property*, Google’s YouTube purchase must be one of the biggest contributions to increase in popularity. (*Both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan have never disclosed the number of search volume in past.)

While Yahoo Japan is still the most popular site in Japan, they’ve only gained about 8.4 mil accesses/month since December 2005, compared to Google’s 14.6 mil gain during the same period of time.

As Google becoming more popular, the online marketing and advertising cost needs to be monitored closely in 2008, and the budget allocation should be reviewed and updated accordingly.

Yahoo! Sites remained the top-ranked property in Japan with 41.3 million visitors, followed by Google Sites with 31.7 million visitors and Microsoft Sites with 29.4 million visitors. “Yahoo! maintains its hold on the Japanese Internet market,” said Maru Sato, Managing Director of comScore Japan. “Their sites reach nearly 77 percent of the total Internet audience in Japan.”
 

** Ranking based on the top 100 Japanese properties in October 2007. ** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Propelled by interest in the Ministry of Defense payoff scandal, news sites IZA.ne.jp and JIJI.com both experienced increases in traffic as people sought the latest developments in the story. IZA.ne.jp experienced a 60-percent gain to 8.6 million visitors, making it the top-gaining property for the month, while JIJI.com increased 57 percent to nearly 3 million visitors. In October, several sports events caused both Nikkansports.com and Sponichi.co.jp to experience an increase in visitation. Driven by Japan’s Daisuke Matsuzaka pitching for the Boston Red Sox in the Major League Baseball World Series, Japan Professional Baseball’s Japan Series and controversy surrounding the Boxing Flyweight World Championship match, Nikkansports.com grew 35 percent to 4.1 million visitors while Sponichi.co.jp rose 12 percent to nearly 2.7 million visitors.