Comments on: Search engine habits of the Japanese http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/10/05/search-engine-habits-of-the-japanese/ From kimono to keitai; research Japanese facts and figures through translated opinion polls and surveys. Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:29:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.1 By: Lex http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/10/05/search-engine-habits-of-the-japanese/#comment-36939 Lex Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:49:22 +0000 http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/10/05/search-engine-habits-of-the-japanese/#comment-36939 Hi Ken, Another interesting post - Thanks - I'm now an RSS subscriber. Those are quite strong comments about Wikipedia. Putting aside issues around linking, and just focusing on accuracy and reliability for a moment, you say that English search engines are "polluted" with Wikipedia results. As a search engine user, I value wikipedia results. Of course I have some understanding of how a Wikipedia page is created, and so I treat the information accordingly, but in general I find Wikipedia information _more_ reliable than other search engine results. If I want information on a certain model of computer for example, the manufacturer's web site is going to be full of spin, and other sites are likely to be just composed by one person and quite likely to be focussed on one aspect of that model. The Wikipedia page, while not guaranteed to be error free, is likely to have a succinct summary, and links to further detail. Regarding the survey - I wonder how many Japanese users use an english search engine (which in some cases may be a way of configuring your search engine to return English language results as a priority). For cases where most of the answers out there are in English, this would be a sensible thing to do. I suspect that the popularity of Yahoo! has to with it's prominence as an ISP here. I'm pretty sure a 60 something internet user I know didn't configure his browser home page to Yahoo! by himself. It was probably set up that way as part of the "new PC + ISP" package. Hi Ken,

Another interesting post - Thanks - I’m now an RSS subscriber.

Those are quite strong comments about Wikipedia. Putting aside issues around linking, and just focusing on accuracy and reliability for a moment, you say that English search engines are “polluted” with Wikipedia results. As a search engine user, I value wikipedia results. Of course I have some understanding of how a Wikipedia page is created, and so I treat the information accordingly, but in general I find Wikipedia information _more_ reliable than other search engine results. If I want information on a certain model of computer for example, the manufacturer’s web site is going to be full of spin, and other sites are likely to be just composed by one person and quite likely to be focussed on one aspect of that model. The Wikipedia page, while not guaranteed to be error free, is likely to have a succinct summary, and links to further detail.

Regarding the survey -

I wonder how many Japanese users use an english search engine (which in some cases may be a way of configuring your search engine to return English language results as a priority). For cases where most of the answers out there are in English, this would be a sensible thing to do.

I suspect that the popularity of Yahoo! has to with it’s prominence as an ISP here. I’m pretty sure a 60 something internet user I know didn’t configure his browser home page to Yahoo! by himself. It was probably set up that way as part of the “new PC + ISP” package.

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