世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published the results of a survey carried out in the middle of June into advertisements in search results. This was part of a bigger survey on search engines in general, but sadly the results are not available to the general public. They interviewed 1,031 members of their monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.8% of the respondents were female, with 23.9% of the total sample in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 8.0% in their fiftiesm and 2.0% in their sixties.

One very suprising result is that MSN has a mere 3.7% market share as a primary search engine. Given that MSN is the default page for Internet Explorer in most new installs of Windows, this indicates perhaps a serious level of dissatisfaction with MSN overcoming user inertia.

Another surprise is over two-thirds of users go at least three pages deep into search results. However, the question is not phrased explicitly to find out the maximum or the average, but I feel the answers given indicate the average limit of the user’s patience. I don’t know if this result indicates if people are bad at formulating queries or the search results are usually pretty poor.

First of all, 23.5% of the sample only use just the one search engine. Nearly a half, or 47.3%, use two, and another quarter or so (23.7%) use three, with the habits of the remaining 5.5% not reported.

The search engine users mainly used were first, Yahoo! Japan with nearly half the users, or 48.2%, selecting it. 35.1% were Googlers, 7.5% used goo, just 3.7% chose MSN, and the remaining 5.5% scattered amongst the other minor players.

Q1: Up to about how many pages of search results do you view? (Sample size=1,013)

One page	7.4%
Two pages	23.4%
Three pages	39.9%
Four pages	6.0%
Five or more pages	23.4%

When asked about awareness of advert placement around the actual search results, over 90% did know about them.

Q2: Have you ever clicked on an advert surrounding search results? (Sample size=959)

Yes	59.5%
No	40.5%

There is no mention of frequency of clicking, or of motivation to click on these advertisements. This 59.5% of those aware of advertising translates to at least 55.4% of the total sample size clicking on adverts. Some of the 54 people unaware of advertising may of course be unwittingly clicking on them.

Q3: Which locations for advertisements have you clicked on? (Sample size=571, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Above the search results	376	65.8%
To the right of the search results	305	53.4%
Below the search results	30	5.3%
Other	8	1.4%

Note that Yahoo! Japan puts adverts above, below and to the right; Google only puts them on the right. A breakdown on click-through by search site would be useful.