Yahoo Still Top Search Engine In Japan

Yahoo’s beating Google by a considerable amount – according to comScore, it received 10.2 million more visitors in the month of August alone.  Yahoo’s even doing well compared to the Japanese competition; Maru Sato, comScore Japan’s managing director, told bigmouthmedia, “Since our first official ranking in June, we have seen Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft sites remain unchanged as the top three properties in Japan.”

So how did the American also-ran manage to become a Japanese success story?  Well, the company didn’t unveil some special new feature set.  And I’m not sure that it has anything to do with different cultures.

Instead, as 24/7 Wall St.’s Douglas McIntyre wrote, “Perhaps the most important thing is that the company has several large shareholders including Softbank, a large multimedia company with interests in broadband, telecom, and wireless operations.”   Money and business connections are sure to have an influence anywhere, regardless of the land’s technological capabilities.

So take note: when our robot butlers finally arrive, Yahoo may not be their preferred search engine.

“Baidu has a 69.5 percent share of the search market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, up 7.6 percentage points since last year,” reported the IDG News Service’s Sumner Lemon.   “Meanwhile, Google saw its share of the market shrink, falling 1.1 percentage points to 23 percent.”

The report from which Lemon was working was created by China IntelliConsulting Corp.; also, the report measured things from year to year, so those numbers aren’t just a temporary dip or minor setback.

Then again, some more recent data offered Google a tiny amount of hope.  “[O]ver the last six months, Google has made slight inroads in the battle for online popularity, enjoying a rise in market share of 1.4 per cent, while Baidu only gained 0.5 per cent over the same period,” noted bigmouthmedia.

So it’s not yet time to order a tombstone for Google China, but that’s about the only positive thing that can be said.

Bebo, in case you haven’t heard, is a social network, and in certain parts of the world (like the UK and Ireland), it’s more popular than both MySpace or Facebook.  So Yahoo, and Yahoo’s advertisers, will get the chance to reach what marketers consider a young and desirable demographic.

From Bebo’s perspective, everything is also coming up roses.  “The partnership with Yahoo! enables us to focus on custom sponsorship campaigns and groundbreaking original productions with the knowledge that our display advertising is handled by a partner that guarantees the highest quality ad for each user interaction,” stated Joanna Shields, Bebo’s “president, international,” in a press release.

Shields then presumably took a deep breath.  But jokes about wordiness aside, Yahoo is probably grateful for Shields’s comment – aside from the acquisition of BlueLithium, not a lot has been going right for the company lately.  Execs can consider this arrangement a very firm check in the “win” column, however.

Hat tip to bigmouthmedia.

Granted, “ever” isn’t a particularly long time for these companies or this report – as bigmouthmedia notes, the ACSI has only been around since 2002.  And Google wasn’t exactly walloped – with a rating of 78, it was just barely edged out by Yahoo’s 79.  Still, some of the survey’s other findings indicate that a critical point has been reached.

“Even more important than Yahoo’s first lead over Google is the trend of their scores moving in opposite directions,” stated Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results (the sponsor of the ACSI report).  Yahoo’s score rose by nearly four percent in the past year, while Google’s decreased by about the same amount.

“Since the ACSI is a leading indicator of financial performance on the macro scale and at the company level, we may see a real turnaround for Yahoo! in the next year,” Freed continued.

A similar prediction might apply to Ask, considering that its four-point increase qualifies as the year’s biggest.  “Ask.com is making huge inroads on the other competitors in the portal and search engine category,” said Freed. “And it has done this despite a second relaunch this year, which was apparently carried off so well that it didn’t have the usual backlash of dropping customer satisfaction scores.  Ask.com has mastered the crucial mix of evolution and revolution.”

And Google has apparently gotten the hang of goofing up the ACSI survey.

Google and Oliver Williams, that is; Williams, who works for BBC Berkshire, constructed a Google Map to track the flooding.  “We’re trying to keep it updated around the clock with the latest flood warnings for Berkshire alongside photos, video and audio from visitors to the site and our own reporters,” he wrote following Ed Parsons’s coverage of the map.

Parsons acts as Google’s “Geospatial Technologist,” so maybe it’s not too surprising that he would deal with this development.   But bigmouthmedia and the Guardian Unlimited, which are based in the UK, have also taken note of Williams’s map.  Bobbie Johnson called it “a powerful example of how data can be pooled online and added to by individuals.”   Similar creations have since been made to show where safe drinking water can be found.

So Williams certainly deserves a pat on the back (as do the other maps’ authors).   As for Google’s role in all of this . . .  “May I say the Google Map is holding up remarkably well and serving exactly the purpose I had in mind – very flexible and brilliant for illustrating exactly which rivers are in trouble,” Williams wrote.

“My only gripe . . . is that there’s a limit of 100 markers before you get a second ‘page’ of them,” he continued.  “Then you have to move between pages to see the markers and that’s less than ideal, so I have to keep the number below 100.  But you can’t have it all, especially when it’s free!”   And especially, perhaps, when Google Maps was never designed to be a crisis-management tool.

Best wishes to Britain.

Of course, you may not even need to use the engine – I saw an image on BigStockPhoto’s home page that would have been perfect for that old project.  But should you wind up searching, expect no delays – the official press release makes two references to “lightning speed.”

“Designed to improve site navigation, narrow search results and enable users to find their images more quickly, the new search engine technology is set to be the first of a raft of new introductions by the firm,” explains bigmouthmedia.  Those “new introductions” remain rather ill-defined, however, despite a statement from Tim Donahue, BigStockPhoto’s founder and CEO.

“We’re excited about our future growth opportunities and will continue to develop improved search capabilities and new site features,” said Donahue in the release.  “We know these tools are critical to the success of our community.”  Indeed, since BigStockPhoto claims to have a “library of over 1.2 million stock images,” search capabilities are a pretty good idea.

This development should prove useful to design- and art-oriented people.  I’m just happy to see a sports car on BigStockPhoto’s front page.

“The annual value of pan-European online advertising is set to reach 16bn euros ($22bn; £10.8bn) by 2012,” states the BBC.  Of course, Europe’s a pretty big place, so the article later narrows matters down by adding, “The UK will continue to see the most online advertising in the next four years, ahead of Germany and France.”

That’s not hard to believe, given the BBC’s recent experiments with social media.  For that matter, BBC execs have made commitments to being online for quite some time now.

But as the UK leaps ahead, don’t look for other European countries to hang back; various aspects of the report point to a strong growth (and wide spread) in internet use.  “[T]he research group showed that European internet users spend 14.3 hours per week online, compared to 11.3 hours watching TV and 4.4 hours reading newspapers and magazines,” notes a bigmouthmedia piece.

And from the report itself (via the BBC), another note on the business side of things: “After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realise that the net is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion.”

Blackle operates on the principle that displaying a black computer screen requires less energy than showing a white screen.  This only holds true when CRT monitors are involved, but “an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts,” according to Mark Ontkush.

Ontkush was cited two months ago in an article by TreeHugger about Blackle.  Since, then, Blackle has been mentioned by the Brisbane Times (an Australian publication), bigmouthmedia (a UK company), and the Hindustan Times (which is based in India) – word is definitely spreading.

And from a pure “search” standpoint, there’s no reason for it not to; Blackle’s design is very similar to Google’s, and the search results are identical.  Getting used to the gray-text-on-black-background is difficult, however, and many people (including your humble author) have found it harder to read then the traditional black-on-white.  Time wasted due to squinting may make up for the slight difference in power levels.

Still, given Google’s interest in conservation, it’s interesting to see what people have done with the engine in the environment’s name.

That sentence comes courtesy of bigmouthmedia, which is an excellent source of information, and I had visions of Yahoo dispersing men in trench coats throughout the land (perhaps as some sort of foot patrol to counteract the cars of Google’s Street View).  At last, it occurred to me that users should probably be worried about roaming costs.

Now that all would-be Zurfer fans have been assured of their physical safety, it seems reasonable to move on with a description of the service.  Zurfer has several interesting features, yet Yahoo Berkley Research sums things up nicely by writing, “Access all the world’s photos on the go.  Follow friends, explore Flickr, and find any image using Zurfer.”

Elsewhere on the page, an added benefit is named: “Zurfer will make you better looking and socially popular.”

Yet another group of sentences makes me start to wonder just what’s going on at Yahoo Berkley Research.  “Zurfer is a research prototype,” a page – the main page – notes.  “Last time we checked, Zurfer was running on Nokia S60 phones and Motorola RAZR V3x.”

So, well, there you have it.  Yahoo has made a service available that may, depending on your hardware, work with Flickr and have nearly miraculous side effects on your personal life.  If this sounds like your sort of thing, then, as the Zurfer site suggests, “Go Zurfing!”  But watch out for those roaming coats.

“Google and Yahoo have both recently banned advertisements on pay-to-play online gambling websites in the UK,” reports bigmouthmedia, “but Google are the first major engine to ban all forms of online gambling advertising from their service.”  Part of me feels inclined to mutter something about spoilsports.

Yet Google doesn’t want anyone to think it’s getting high and mighty.  In a statement, the company said, “While we respect people’s differing views on gambling – and support freedom of expression – we believe that this new policy is simpler for everyone to understand and more in tune with users’ wishes.”

Nonetheless, the bigmouthmedia article is showing up in a lot of places (PokerNews.com, Online-Casinos.com, Sportsbook.com, and Eye On Gambling), and I don’t know that every reader is celebrating its arrival.

Google’s decision does, at least, make one company look good to would-be advertisers: Microsoft.  As reported by bigmouthmedia, “This leaves MSN as the only one of the three major search engines still allowing advertising for pay-to-play gambling websites in the UK.”