I did some follow up searches for the question that came up in class about whether or not Google is the dominant search engine everywhere in the world.
Apparently, there are five countries where Google doesn't dominate as the search engine: China (dominated by Baidu), Korea (Naver), Japan (Yahoo! Japan), Czech Republic (Seznam), and Russia (Yandex).
All five of the search engines mentioned above except Baidu are portals, where they have links to stories etc beside the search functions. Baidu started a Japanese version in 2007, and Naver plans to launch one in 2009.
*Sept 2008 article from marketingpilgrim.com;
*Sept 2008 article from shanghaiist;
*Feb 2009 article from The Economist about search engine markets in East Asia
Why do you think Google doesn't do well in these countries? Do you think this is a good or bad thing? Do you think the popularity of web-portals with countries that use non-Roman alphabets means something? (i.e. does Google not index foreign pages as well?)
Other thoughts?
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Well some of the reasons (and I am mostly talking about China here) could be due to government restrictions. Obviously Google and its vast reach doesn't bode well with China's government. Google is certainly taking steps to try and change that though. For instance I know that in China they are giving away free music downloads in order to get their name out. As for the other countries, Google's lack of popularity could be cultural, technological, etc. Or it could simply be that Google hasn't or isn't willing to devote the resources to cracking these markets that already have a dominant search engines.
ReplyDeleteI agree. A lot of Google's troubles in its attempt to crack new markets ties back to its very open and democratic ideas. Google seeks to spread information and make it very accessible to most of the world, and this goal often conflicts with a Chines government who wants to be seen as accepting of people's rights and its citizen's attempt to access information, but at the same time not allow people to search it's crude reality and history, as in affairs such as Tianemen Square. China is a very large market for Google, it will be interesting to see how much they budge towards the Chinese government's demands.
ReplyDeleteBranding. Branding. Branding. Personally and maybe I am wrong but I like to agree with my Gary Vaynerchuk when he says that it is all about branding. And who would think it? Even google has to put the effort and marketing time into make a brand for themselves and my personal opinion and guess is that they just haven't done it in these other countries like they did in the United States.
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