Google beaten in the Far East

Life on the other side of the planet. (www.richard-wilkinson.com)

Google dominates the search engine rankings for the majority of the western world. Their dominance extends beyond just the english speaking world as the success of Google.fr exemplifies. Internet users in the East Asia, however, are yet to be won over by Google Search. In China for example, Google has only ever attained about a third of the search engine market, lagging significantly behind the Chinese search engine Baidu. In Japan, Google is surprisingly beaten by Yahoo! Even more concerning must be the figures published by the FT yesterday which stated Google’s share of the search engine market in South Korea to be “less than 2%”.

So why has the Far East remained elusive to Google Search? One of the remarkable features of the Google Search webpage is the perpetuality of its original design. The centeral theme of the design is its simplicity which essentially only consists of the Google logo, a search box and a few buttons. Other major search engine providers such as Yahoo!, MSN and the prominent Asian search engines such as Baidu and Naver, have opted to clutter their search start pages with news, gossip and other features.

The Google search results pages also remain largely unchanged from the original design. The search results are essentially presented in an uninterrupted ranked list. This is despite the obvious practical advantages to be had from providing ‘clustered results’ as epitomised by clusty.com which aims to group search results by context (e.g. apple the fruit | Apple the company), and also by providing the results according to media format as epitomised by Naver, which segregates general webpages, news sites, blogs, images, videos etc etc…

For the moment, Google still believes that the simplified service is the best way to go, and moreover to deliver the same design of service across its international domains. The question is whether Google will budge on this position given its diversity of users as well a general growing appetite and competence online.

As summed up by Hwang Ji-sun, a 22-year-old college student in Seoul, “I love Naver because everything I need is conveniently shown on the first page. I get everything from news, shopping advice, the latest entertainment gossip, interesting pictures and hot search words. On Google you see nothing but a search box.” (excerpt from the FT).