世論 What Japan Thinks

I love search engines, not least because they are responsible for generating about 75% of my AdSense income! I get barely any traffic from Japanese-language searches, however. To find out a bit more about what the Japanese do with them, as reported by japan.internet.com, JR Tokai Express recently conducted a survey into the rather grandly titled subject of information gathering power of search portal sites.

Demographics

On the 7th of September 2007 334 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group who were employed in the public or private sector (why limit to these, I don’t know. Perhaps there was additional questions on work-based usage patterns?) answered an internet-based questionnaire. 82.3% of the sample was male, 12.3% in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 38.9% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 0.3%, or just one person, was in their sixties.

I’d love to know where people most often get their answers from. If the Japanese keyword side of the search engines are as polluted with Wikipedia results as the English side, then perhaps a lot of people are taking the Wikipedia results at face value. There was an interesting case this week about how a rogue edit, making the recently-deceased Ronny Halzehurst a co-author of a pop hit, was copied by lazy journalists, and now these newspaper’s error is used to back up the veracity of Wikipedia’s disinformation.

Research results

Q1: How many search engine portal sites do you use? (Sample size=334)

Whether the 6.0% who do not use portals do not search at all or use toolbars for their searching needs is not made clear.

Q1SQ1: Which search engine portal site do you use the most? (Sample size=314)

Note that the above percentages include not just search, but other features too; Yahoo!, for instance, has train timetable information and better Japanese address finding, for instance.

Q1SQ2: When you go searching at a search engine portal, about how many keywords do you usually use in a single search phrase? (Sample size=314)

Q1SQ3: About how often do you find what you are looking for? (Sample size=314)

Finally, people were asked to rate the searching strength of the search engine portal site they used the most. 19.4% thought it was very good, 62.7% quite good, 2.5% not very good, and the remaining 15.4% were split between poor and cannot say either way, although I suspect the poor percentage was very low.