I was very surprised to see that the transfer of tech was going from Google to Yahoo Japan. I say this because I recently did some research which involved very limited testing on how various search engines handled Japanese searches and I found that Yahoo Japan did the best job of the six I tested (namely Yahoo US, Yahoo Japan, Google US, Google Japan, Bing US and Bing Japan). Albeit it was very limited testing and I am not a Japanese speaker, but I checked the various behaviors with a Japanese speaker and they told me that Yahoo Japan was the ‘best behaved’:
Under the terms of the new alliance, Yahoo will use Google’s search and advertising platform technology to power its site, matching Google’s superior tech with its own, highly popular content portals. In Japan, Google hasn’t quite enjoyed the success it has elsewhere around the world, trailing Yahoo in search dominance. This new deal makes it the cock of the walk; according to the New York Times, Google and Yahoo together comprise 90.5 percent of the Japanese search market. (If you’re wondering why Yahoo would cut against Microsoft like this, the answer is that Yahoo is actually a minority owner in its own Japanese property; the biggest shareholder is the cell phone company SoftBank.)
(Via Beyond Search.)
François Schiettecatte's Blog 