世論 What Japan Thinks

Recently, Marsh Inc performed a survey into online map searching, the results of which were reported by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 9th of January 2010 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was 50:50 male and female, 1.3% in their teens, 18.7% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Thinking about it, I don’t usually do map search – for Japanese-language searches, just entering the address into Google usually turns up a direct link to a map site or an official page with an embedded map, and for English-language searches Google usually inlines a map in the main results. The last time I directly searched was when I was going on holiday to Europe and wanted to get driving directions from Google Maps.
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The headline figure is not really surprising to me, partially because it has taken so long to get a survey out on the new search engine Bing from Microsoft, this one being conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 22nd of June 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. There was no split by the the sexes listed for some reason, but 12.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 36.0% in their thirties, 37.3% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 4.7% in their sixties.

I’ve tried Bing a few times, but I suppose I’m just too much of a Google fan to look objectively at it.

As for the name, the first thing I think of is a bing, a mountain of slag from a coal mine. The second is Bing Hitler, who now seems to be doing rather nice for himself as a host on a US late-night chat show.
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Here is the latest set of results from goo Research’s regular monthly survey into internet advertising, their sixth in the series, reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of May 2009 1,089 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, and 27.9% aged fifty or older.

I was disappointed to see (but not surprised looking at my revenue!) that links such as me urging you to buy crappy keitai straps from Japan don’t seem to find much favour with Japanese, but email newsletters being even further down the pecking order seemed a surprise, and I’m not really sure why contextual ads come dead last.
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One very useful number came out of this recent survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into internet advertising, their fifth regular survey on this subject, how often advertisements in search results catch people’s eyes. You may use the third regular survey as a cross-reference.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 23rd of April 2009 1,071 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.1% in their teens, 18.3% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, and 27.7% aged fifty or older.

I think Q1SQ2 is a bit of a confusing result – only 14.8% of adverisement clickers have purchased items, but not all advertisements are selling things, and even advertisements that are are often not directly selling.

I never see search ads, and it’s blocked over 400,000 advertisements in the nine months I’ve had it.
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Looking at my recent statistics, everyone seems pretty much ad-blind on WJT, so looking at this recent survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into internet advertising, their third regular survey on this subject, it looks like I need to get more goo monitors visiting my site!

Demographics

Between the 2nd and 5th of February 2009 1,092 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 15.9% in their forties, and 28.0% aged fifty or older.

I think one can infer that the 15.3% in Q1SQ1 who find advertisements useful includes most if not all of the 14.3% in Q1SQ2 who purchased items as the result of a click. Although one in seven have made a purchase through a search click, there is no information to the total number of clicks to total number of purchases. In addition, not all clicks are through to purchases; indeed I’ve just blocked one advertiser who is promoting their site that contains nothing but stolen content (in fact, twice-stolen, most likely), which I thought was against the Google AdWords rules.
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Since I started running an ad blocker (Ad Muncher), I don’t see any advertisements in search results. However, the use of such software was not investigated in this recent survey published on japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into the topic of internet advertising. This is the first in a regular (monthly, presumably) series.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of November 2008 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sampe were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.0% in their forties, and 27.8% aged fifty or older.

Note that this report concentrated on search results advertising, but the full survey covered many more kinds of internet advertising.

As you might have noticed, I’ve started with contextual advertisements in my RSS feed. Perhaps next month’s survey might cover them, but given the low figures for RSS usage, I don’t hold out much hope!
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Regular readers will know that the most popular search engine in Japan is Yahoo!, with Google just a few percentage points behind, but what do people do at these sites? This recent survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com looking at web search tried to answer these questions.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 12th of September 2008 1,060 members of the goo Research monitor panel (the report actually says goo users, but I don’t know how accurate that is) completed an online survey. 51.9% of the sample were male, 11.6% in their teens, 22.2% in their twenties, 22.0% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 25.3% aged fifty or older.

Ego-searching is looking for your own name in the search engines. Not suprisingly, lots of relevant information turns up about me since I’ve got a unique double-barrel that I use online a bit. However, my full birth name turns up absolutely zero, which is not surprising as I don’t often use my middle name.
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I run an ad blocker, although I keep Google ads live (and I hope you do too!) as they are mostly pretty lightweight and quick to load, and most importantly usually text-only. I do very occasionally click search ads but don’t really find them that useful, and this recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and performed by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into web search showed that a lot of Japanese do too.

Demographics

Over the 3rd and 4th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was male, 3.6% in their teens, 15.2% in their twenties, 37.6% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, 5.8% in their sixties, and 3.0% aged seventy or older.

Note that because many television and print advertisements feature search keywords rather than URLs, rather than engage in SEO activities to naturally boost a product’s home page the companies buy advertising space on the major search engines, thus, perhaps, Japanese people pay more attention to the sponsored links.

From what I’ve heard, if you want to advertise Google of course gives you the largest audience, but Yahoo!’s customers are more click-happy and keen to buy, although Yahoo! has a higher minimum cost per click charge. MSN/Windows Live seems actually to be the best from an overall package point of view, but looking at the results below, if you’re trying to sell in Japan you won’t see much business!
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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.
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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.
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