世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com today reported on the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research on the subject of search engines and advertising keywords. They interviewed 1,099 ordinary members of their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 24.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 22.2% in their forties, 20.6% in their fifties, and 10.7% in their sixties. This article is only a excerpt from their full report, which seems to have lots more relevant statistics regarding this subject.

I’m very curious to know whether search keywords are used as heavily in other countries. The majority of television adverts seem to have keywords, often with no URL, greatly outnumbering those with only URLs. I also wonder if any of these Japanese advertising search terms have been usurped by googlebombing, as they do seem ripe for targeting.

Interestingly enough, the page on “Google bombing” in Wikipedia is translated into 17 other languages, but Japanese is conspicuous by its absence. Googlebombing (Google 爆撃, bakugeki) only appears once in Japanese Wikipedia in the middle of another page discussing SEO techniques. Surely there must be some well-known Japanese Googlebombs, or even Yahoobombs, since that engine is the winner in Q1?

First, looking at the basic search engine usage patterns of the sample, 26.8% regularly used just one, 42.8% used two, and 22.4% used three sites. The remaining 8.0% were split between those who used four or more and those who didn’t use any.

Q1: Which search site do you use the most? (Sample size=1,099)

	Votes	Percentage
Yahoo! JAPAN	514	46.8%
Google	429	39.0%
goo	58	5.3%
Infoseek	26	2.4%
MSN	23	2.1%
BIGLOBE	17	1.5%
excite	8	0.7%
nifty	7	0.6%
DION	4	0.4%
OCN	4	0.4%
livedoor	2	0.2%
So-net	2	0.2%
Hatena	1	0.1%
freshEYE	0	0.0%
hi-ho	0	0.0%
Ask.jp	0	0.0%
Other	4	0.4%

Compared with the figures from June of last year, Yahoo! has lost 1.4% and Google has gained 3.9% percent. Perhaps we may see Google take the lead in Japan by the end of this year?

Q2: Have you ever clicked on advertisments in search engine results? (Sample=1,099)

Yes	51.4%
No	38.2%
Didn’t know there were advertisements	10.4%

Q3: Have you ever seen a television advertisement that asked you to search for a key word? (Sample size=1,099)

Yes (to SQ)	61.0%
No	39.0%

Q3SQ: Have you searched for any of the key words that you saw? (Sample size=670)

Yes	32.2%
No	67.8%

When compared with a similar survey conducted last September, we see that the number of people having seen these sorts of advertisements has increased about 10 percentage points.