Slashdot Mirror
In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google
babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.
Still, Yandex is unbelievable crap - results-quality wise. I'd say Top3 go in reverse in this parameter. But the problem I think - apart from advertising (Y had a rather big ad campaign some time ago) - is that Google seriously dropped the ball and showed huge negligence and ignorance when entering local market unprepared - for example, their engine did not even search for different wordforms and Russian of course has an ultra-developed word endings system. So - at first - Google was 99% useless. Plus - Y had been around the longest and most people simply don't care about switching.
Yeah, but here in S. Korea, I don't even think they know who Google is. That's pretty impressive. Want to do an internet search? Naver.com. Want a map? Naver. Want a friend's e-mail address? Naver. Shopping? Naver. Jeez. It's everyone's home page. It searches everything in Korea. No one uses anything else.
Put identity in the browser.
You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search. This is often good enough if you know exactly what you're looking for, like lyrics of a song, but if the query is more abstract, local search engines always win.
FYI: Kvasir is based on google with some tweaks for norwegian sites.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
"The non English speaking market is generally assumed to be underdeveloped (Africa, Indian subcontinent) "
I think you forgot to mention the European Continent where people speak underdeveloped languages like French and German, and Asia of course, which is just slightly bigger than China alone (Indonesia alone has about 240 million inhabitants)
Besides that, English is rather well spoken in India as well as large parts of Africa, underdeveloped as they might be.
American primary education, it's tough.
My main purpose for commenting was to point out the article linked solely to Newsweek pages: a Newsweek story and a couple of limp stories about searching in South Korea and Russia ALSO from Newsweek. No bad rap on Newsweek though, all the better for them linking to three of their own stories in one article.
Oh.
I live in Finland, Europe, and Google is #1 here. So, to me it was a surprise that local search engines are so strong elsewhere in the world. Everyone knows and uses Google here, the local search engines are hardly known. Funny, locals have advertised themselves quite a lot, Google hasn't, and Google is still #1.
It still doesn't work very well. Yandex can conjugate the whole phrases and can work with composited words (words containing more than one stem). Google still uses simple word normalization.