Google, Yahoo Conquering Asia In Search
Worldwide business appears to look good for Google, Yahoo and Baidu, as their search engine attracted the biggest chunk of Asia’s search rankings in April, with Korean Internet users looking for information most often, a comScore survey released Tuesday said.
According to comScore, Google sites topped the region with 39.1% of all searches conducted in April 2008, followed by Yahoo with 24% and Baidu came in third with 16.7%, and was the highest-ranking Asia-based search engine, one of five that appeared in comScore’s top 10.
Among other Asian sites, Korean Internet users carried out the most searches during the month, with an average of 103.5, followed by users in Japan with 102.6, and Singapore with 100.9. Chinese searchers were the biggest as a group, with 82.8 million. Japan ranked second with 60.05 million, and lastly India with 28.1 million.
Although Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites conquered the greater part of the search share in the region, five of the top ten search properties are local country entities, including China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN Corporation, which has a 5.3% share and which also owns search engine Naver.com.
Chinese companies Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search capabilities although they are not purely search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.
Thus over 82 million Chinese Internet users conducted 6.2 billion total searches in April — an average of 75 searches per searcher. For its part, Australia was not far behind on the list with nearly 98 searches per person.
Google has long exalted the virtues of doing business internationally. It may have taken longer than the company liked to grow in the broadband-friendly Asian market, but they seem to be on track to becoming the leading search player.
“Local search engines may not agree with that, nevertheless the latest figures comScore made available indicate otherwise.”
Searches conducted from public computers, such as those found in Internet cafes and those made from mobile devices including PDAs were excluded from the results.