Google is undoubtedly the dominant search engine globally, but in a few countries such as Korea (Naver), Russia (Yandex) or Japan, local competitors are winning. Especially Japan, the country with the world’s third biggest Internet population (about 100 million people are online), still seems to be a tough nut to crack for Google.
Nielsen Japan reports that in October 2008, Yahoo Search saw a total of over 3.5 billion page views, while No. 2 Google trailed with 2.6 billion page views. According to a Comscore Japan ranking released in September 2008, Yahoo ruled the Japanese search engine market with a share of 51.2% (Google reached 39.0% in that month).
It’s not that Google isn’t trying. In recent months, the company rolled out a number of online ads, offline promotion campaigns and several Japan-only services (Picasa recently started offering QR codes for easy mobile access, for example). And today it came to light they are now paying bloggers to write nice things about Google - a marketing tool TechCrunch never really was a big fan of.
Here is the background:
On Thursday last week, Google Japan revamped the top page and included a new, Japan-only “Hot Keywords” section displaying the top 5 search terms currently googled in Japan (see screenshot below).
Users have been able to add a gadget containing the top 10 hot keywords to iGoogle for months and now can also integrate the list into their blogs as widgets. In its current form, Google Japan looks more like a portal site than any other version worldwide, a product strategy obviously aimed at disputing Yahoo’s standing.
Original Source:
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