Motoko’s weblog

Back in May, Google launched “Rich Snippets” in Google.com search results. This review and price range information appear in the search results. It requires you to add the markup formats to your website.

Rich Snippets was just rolled-out in Japan, which is the second market to use this feature. August and December are 2 of the biggest gift giving months in Japan, and this new feature came out just in time to help those holiday shoppers.

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About 3 weeks ago, the news of Google Japan using paid bloggers to promote their new “hot new keywords” function on the top page took over the search industry around the world. (You can read my initial thought on the topic here.) What’s very interesting to me is that everyone has been spinning it as a “link-spam scheme”, and as a result, Google “punished” Google Japan by down grading the page rank from 9 to 5. (Yeah, that should really hurt Google Japan. lol)

Paid or not, the “word of mouth” campaign using blog has been quite effective in Japan. Many people are aware that some of the bloggers may be paid to write the review, and still welcome the information especially since being compensated doesn’t mean that they’d write something that are not true. Several surveys done in Japan show that people trust and value what they read on blog posts, and often time what they read has an impact on their purchasing decision or action. I assume that Continue Reading »

Is Yahoo the most popular search engine in Japan? – This is one of the questions that I get all the time. My answer is usually, “Yes, but…”.

The reason for my “but…” is that the engines never disclose the search volumes in Japan. The numbers came out from Japan market in past were all “number of accesses to the site”: “property popularity”and they didn’t represent the search related traffic. This is why Yahoo Japan, a popular portal site, has been mistakengly named as the popular search engine in Japan. Actually, Yahoo is also more popular (by number of PV) than Google in US, but no one point that out.

These engines still don’t officially announce the search volume, but I heard that the difference in search volumes between Yahoo and Google had shrunk to only 2-3%, which means that businesses targeting Japanese market must do well in both Yahoo and Google. Continue Reading »

When Google opened the R&D Center in Korea last year, they announced its plan to invest $140 million in Korean market including some of the IT company acquisitions. Their latest announcement to invest additional $10million in Korean market shows how eager they are to gain the market share there.

Since Google entered in Korean market in 2005, their search market share has been kept small at 5% level. Not even Google has been able to take the market share from Korea’s number 1 search site, Naver.

Google has R&D Center in Japan and China, both of which markets they were able to gain the market share in recent years. Now, Google ranks at #2 in both Japan and China. Being able to provide the services that work in each market through R&D Center rather than to push the same model used in US looks like the key to their success in Asian market.