Yahoo! Japan still beating Google in search
Google rightfully beats Yahoo! hands down for English language search, but I never seem to have too much luck with Google and Japanese. I stay away from Yahoo! Japan as I find the design extremely ugly, but this doesn’t seem to be a factor with the natives according to a survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into information gathering through search portal sites.
Demographics
Between the 31st of January and the 3rd of February 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group employed in either public or private industry completed an internet-based questionnaire. 80.9% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 40.0% in their thirties, 37.3% in their forties, 11.2% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.
One thing I’m not sure if Yahoo! Japan does, but it is something that Google definitely doesn’t, is to search alternative verb forms, so that if you put in the infinitive it also searches past tense, progressive, passive, and so one. That would be nice, but top of my wish list would be alternative kanji and kana alternatives for a word; for example, skin clinic could appear as 皮膚科, 皮フ科, ひふ科 or even ヒフ科, so it would be nice if I typed in just one form and the search engine matched all the variants.
Research results
First, from the sample 316 people, or 95.8%, used search portal sites.
Q1: Which search portal do you use the most? (Sample size=316)
Yahoo! Japan 50.0% 42.7% MSN (Live Search) 3.2% goo 1.9% Infoseek 1.9% Ask.jp 0.0% livedoor 0.0% Other 0.3% Don’t know 0.0% Q2: When searching, about how often do you find what you are looking for? (Sample size=316)
Find it every time 18.0% Find it most of the time 77.5% Find it some of the time 4.4% Never find it 0.0% Q3: When searching, which ones of the following search functions do you think are useful? (Sample size=316, multiple answer)
&nbps; Votes Percentage AND 234 74.1% OR 97 30.7% Keyword exclusion, - operator 71 22.5% Site search 53 16.8% Exact match, + operator 41 13.0% Phrase search, quoted search 38 12.0% URL search 23 7.3% None in particular 32 10.1% Don’t know 5 1.6% Other 6 1.9%
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amake said,
February 12, 2008 @ 23:34
I’m really glad that Google doesn’t try to be smarter than you and search for verb forms other than you specified in your search string. I use Google to check if Japanese phrasings I want to write are common or not, and if it starts returning all sorts of conjugations I didn’t ask for then it would be a whole lot less useful to me.
And I could have sworn I’ve seen Google match alternate writings on some things, but I can’t for the life of me find an example right now.
Nick Ramsay said,
February 13, 2008 @ 00:38
This doesn’t mean that Yahoo! Japan is the most used search engine, though. People might have the Google Toolbar, or use Google as the default search in the IE7/Firefox browser. The first question is about search portals, and if that literally means using the Yahoo homepage instead of the Google one, then these results aren’t very surprising. Was the question about portals or engines? Would the respondents even know the difference?
Hang on. My comment sounds kind of silly. This is obviously about search engines, right? Let’s clear this up with a definition: “portal site: a site that the owner positions as an entrance to other sites on the internet; “a portal typically has search engines and free email and chat rooms etc.”
Ken said,
February 13, 2008 @ 03:50
for example, skin clinic could appear as 皮膚科, 皮フ科, ひふ科 or even ヒフ科, so it would be nice if I typed in just one form and the search engine matched all the variants.
100% agreed. I have done some work on this, and processing the queries via encoding matches, for example by mapping escaped encoded strings…though admittedly on pretty small time stuff in comparison to the giant search engines. The issue I’ve always seen is with the amount of processing it takes up in relation to the improvement in results (on some terms results were vastly improved, while on others it was only marginally improved because one configuration of kanji and/or kana was the generally accepted ‘best practice’ term to be used, and thus was used by the best results, and also by the most inputs - the problem being that establishing such conditions is essentially random from a programming point of view and the benefit becomes impossible to measure). It would be a cool feature for someone like Google to include on their ‘advanced’ search capabilities, and I’m somewhat surprised that there is nothing dealing with it in Google Labs, mostly because it’s fun to try.
Ken Y-N said,
February 13, 2008 @ 08:53
Amake, you can use the “+” operator in Google to stop it matching English verb conjugations and synonyms, so no doubt similar facilities would be offering in Japanese.
Nick, yes it was rather a confusing study, as it used “Search portal site” 「検索ポータルサイトにおける情報収集力」に関する調査 and あなたが最もよく利用する検索ポータルサイトをひとつお答えください, but I’d classify Google as just an engine rather than a portal, except if you use the Google personalised home page thingie, which I sincerely doubt even 4.2% use, let alone 42%!
Ken, Google are working on statistics-based machine translation, so one of the by-products would surely be frequency tables of variants, so to them I don’t think this is really that big an issue.
pin said,
February 13, 2008 @ 16:22
In the case of japanese wikipeida,
http://markezine.jp/a/article/aid/2549.aspx
7million people came from yahoo.co.jp and 3 million people came from google, which means that more than twice people are using yahoo than google.
In the case of accessup.org,
http://find.accessup.org/kensaku/access_history.html
more than 80% people come from yahoo, and less than 20%people come from Google.
So the referer is not all but google is apprently weaker in Japan.
And Google is not no.1 in Korea and China, too and I think it won’t change forever.
Mahjabeen said,
August 17, 2008 @ 11:37
i need help from japan people pl if some one can help