Search engine habits of the Japanese
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)
| One (to SQs) | 21.0% |
| Two (to SQs) | 45.5% |
| Three (to SQs) | 23.4% |
| Four or more (to SQs) | 4.2% |
| None | 6.0% |
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)
| Yahoo! | 49.0% |
| 42.7% | |
| goo | 2.9% |
| infoseek | 2.9% |
| MSN | 1.9% |
| Ask | 0.0% |
| livedoor | 0.0% |
| Other | 0.6% |
| Don’t know | 0.0% |
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)
| One | 24.5% |
| Two | 51.9% |
| Three | 20.4% |
| Four | 1.6% |
| Five or more | 1.0% |
| Don’t know | 1.0% |
Q1SQ3: About how often do you find what you are looking for? (Sample size=314)
| Every time | 14.6% |
| Most times | 82.8% |
| Sometimes | 2.5% |
| Never | 0.0% |
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.
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Read more on: google,jr tokai express research,search,yahoo!
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Lex said,
October 6, 2007 @ 07:49
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.