世論 What Japan Thinks

Last week we learnt that almost all Japanese net users used Google, and indeed almost 50% claimed to use it always, although Gen Kanai did alert me that the figures were most likely dud. To back up his claim, I now present a survey reported on by japan.internet.com, performed by Cross Marketing Inc, on search engine access.

Demographics

Over the 22nd and 23 of August 2007 300 members of the Cross Marketing Inc online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, the sample was evenly split; 50:50 male and female, and 25:25:25:25 from each of the age groups from twenties to fifties.

For myself, I am very rarely unfaithful to Google; whenever the need to access Yahoo! or MSN comes up, I search Google for the engine rather than have any bookmark at the ready. Wifey on the other hand has MSN Japan as her home page and has both Yahoo! and Google toolbars installed. I can’t say I’ve ever seen her use the Yahoo! bar, though, but that’s another matter altogether.

I’m not sure how to interpret the results in Q1SQ1 and Q1SQ2 – why do a larger percentage of Google users have other search engines bookmarked? Is it due to more knowledge of their tools, more power users, or is it that Google does not fully meet Japanese users’ needs?
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UPDATE: This diet does not work!

I’m sadly unable to find any surveys related to the biggest buzz on the English-language internet last week, the release of Apple’s iPhone, so instead I’ll report on goo Ranking’s look at the biggest buzz on Japanese web sites, namely what keywords people are using in goo’s search engine to look for natto. The data was collected between the 7th and 16th of January 2007, or Heisei 19 in the Japanese calendar, thus the title.

Natto is fermented soya beans, and if you search YouTube for natto you can see rather a lot of foreigners (and one cat) trying to eat it. (link flood coming up!) The shortage of natto has been widely blogged about, and was sparked by Aruaru Daijiten, a popular health (and quackery) show, who in their first show of the New Year introduced the natto diet, which is basically one pack of natto before breakfast and evening meals, then eat just as much as you normally do, assuming the natto hasn’t put you off your food altogether! The most beneficial way to eat natto is to stir it at least 50 times then leave it to stand at room temperature for 15 minutes. It’s something to do with assisting the production of DHEA to increase your metabolic rate, apparently.

In other related news, World Net Daily (I can’t believe I’m linking to that rag!) reported how soy beans turn you gay; natto may be one of the most potent soy bean products, if this video is to be believed! (Note – not really recommended for viewing at work, and probably highly offensive to the typical World Net Daily reader)
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japan.internet.com today reported on the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research on the subject of search engines and advertising keywords. They interviewed 1,099 ordinary members of their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 24.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 22.2% in their forties, 20.6% in their fifties, and 10.7% in their sixties. This article is only a excerpt from their full report, which seems to have lots more relevant statistics regarding this subject.

I’m very curious to know whether search keywords are used as heavily in other countries. The majority of television adverts seem to have keywords, often with no URL, greatly outnumbering those with only URLs. I also wonder if any of these Japanese advertising search terms have been usurped by googlebombing, as they do seem ripe for targeting.

Interestingly enough, the page on “Google bombing” in Wikipedia is translated into 17 other languages, but Japanese is conspicuous by its absence. Googlebombing (Google 爆撃, bakugeki) only appears once in Japanese Wikipedia in the middle of another page discussing SEO techniques. Surely there must be some well-known Japanese Googlebombs, or even Yahoobombs, since that engine is the winner in Q1?
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japan.internet.com released the results of an opinion poll conducted this month by goo Research into searching for your own name and others on the internet. 1,088 people successfully completed the internet-based private questionnaire. 56.3% of the sample was male, 21.8% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 11.5% in their fifties.

This practice is known as egosurfing and is fun from not just the ego point of view, but also for finding others of the same name – my non-double-barreled name is shared with a commentator for the Jets (what Jets, or what sport, I don’t know), a member of the Manitoba Hockey Players Foundation, president for Veridiem Inc, a member of Consumer Direct Scotland, and someone mapping Hong Kong’s cultural landscapes. Interestingly enough, my wife’s name turns up zero Japanese hits and just one false English hit.
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goo Ranking recently published the results of the top 100 search keywords used through their search engine for the first 10 months of this year from January 1st to October 31st. The top word, either individually or extracted from multi-word searches, got 100 points, and the rest of the words got a percentage rating for their frequency. I presume that the adult keywords have been filtered out.

There’s perhaps some interesting analysis that can be done of this data, but I’ll leave that for someone else to tackle! Links have been added to some of the search terms.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into search keywords in television advertising. At the end of September 1,088 people from thier monitor group successfully completed a web-based private questionnaire. Demographically, 58.1% were female, 21.8% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, and 10.6% in their fifties.

Recently, Japanese television advertisements (and some print advertisements too) have tended to use instead of URLs a search keyword. Sometimes there are unique, made-up keywords, such as ウサタク, usataku, which, if fed into Google, matches the expected page. Others, however, have much more generic terms, even just HIS, but which, at the time of writing anyway, also works in Google. This seems like they would be a great target for googlebombing, but this seems not to have happened, which does seem a bit odd to me.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on research by Cross Marketing Inc regarding people’s views on restaurant search web sites. They interviewed 320 people who had used a restaurant search site by means of a private internet questionnaire; half of the sample were male, and a quarter in each of the age groups of their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

This particular segment of the market seems to have assumed the title グルメ, gurume, the Japanese transliteration of gourmet (actually from the French, not English), which is the reason that a number of the web sites listed below start with Guru-.

In my experience, Guru-Navi seems the first stop for most of the people I know; one benefit of the site is that many of the listed restaurants also have discount coupons available for printing out.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published the results of a survey carried out in the middle of June into advertisements in search results. This was part of a bigger survey on search engines in general, but sadly the results are not available to the general public. They interviewed 1,031 members of their monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.8% of the respondents were female, with 23.9% of the total sample in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 8.0% in their fiftiesm and 2.0% in their sixties.

One very suprising result is that MSN has a mere 3.7% market share as a primary search engine. Given that MSN is the default page for Internet Explorer in most new installs of Windows, this indicates perhaps a serious level of dissatisfaction with MSN overcoming user inertia.

Another surprise is over two-thirds of users go at least three pages deep into search results. However, the question is not phrased explicitly to find out the maximum or the average, but I feel the answers given indicate the average limit of the user’s patience. I don’t know if this result indicates if people are bad at formulating queries or the search results are usually pretty poor.
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Recently, IT Media published a list from Yahoo! Japan of the top search keywords through Yahoo!’s search engine, grouped into various categories. Below are a few of the categories, where I presume the more adult search terms have been removed! First, the top overall keywords.
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