Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google Search Competition

Yu [PersonRank 4]

Tuesday, December 19, 2006
17 years ago2,931 views

Granted that analyst's estimates of search market share can be sketchy at best, sometimes there are wide margins where a dominant player is apparent (such as Google in the US). Here are a series of articles being released on Google's competition around the world.

According to the article below these are the dominant search players in other markets:

Russia: Yandex
"Despite grand entrance, the company failed (yet) to establish itself as the leading search brand, mainly due to (a) complexity of the languages from the Cyrillic family, and (b) not being first to market."

South Korea: Naver

Czech: Seznam

"Seznam has a combination of the language understanding and local features that are either too complicated or too specialized for Google to replicate, as admittedly Czech Republic is not that big of an Internet market to engage a major investment of resources by the Mountain View giant. Seznam also enjoys a decent first-mover advantage."

http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/markets-where-google-is-not-a-synonym-of-search/1327

"In many Western European countries, Google is the most popular Web site and by far the most popular search service; in Russia, though, it barely breaks into the top 10. According to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, 28 percent of Russian Internet users on home or office computers visited Google sites in October, making Google the eighth-biggest Internet brand."

"“Our understanding of Russian was not as good as we wanted it to be,” said Kannan Pashupathy, head of international engineering at Google. Google revamped its Russian site last week, Mr. Pashupathy said, improving its ability to deal with Russian, a complex language in which nouns may be one of three genders and be declined in up to six cases."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/technology/18google.html?ei=5058&en=534cf7971b1431fe&ex=1167109200&adxnnl=1&partner=IWON&adxnnlx=1166544019-4M0lx2xMDfFDazxwyV0RjA

Comment: Google just opened an R&D facility in St Petersburg. The Moscow research facility has been open for a year or two now.

Cracking the Japanese search market could be tough. Yahoo is tops with 60% of the market. Google has about 35%, analysts say.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ibd/061204/tech01.html?.v=1

Comment: Baidu is dominant in China. However, Google has opened several R&D facilities (4 now, I believe, if you include Taiwan) with a great team of directors. Most of these facilities have been open for less than a year, so some more time is needed to determine how they will handle China. Despite Yahoo being the dominant player, Baidu is eyeing the Japanese market as well.

Short overview of Czech internet market
http://totheweb.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

European search engines take on Google
http://iht.com/articles/2006/12/17/business/search.php

"Then again, Google's still doing pretty well as far as America is concerned. According to last month's numbers from Nielsen//NetRatings, the company is enjoying a 49.6% share of searches. "
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061218GoogleLosingRaceForRussianCrown.html

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!