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%.

OTOH

[ceeam]

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.

Re:Gotta Love It

[Daengbo]

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.

Re:Character sets?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gotta Love It

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: Kvasir is based on google with some tweaks for norwegian sites.

Re:Character sets?

[rxmd]

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 actually not true anymore. For example, you can do a Google search for "Putin" [google.com], and it will highlight results in other grammatical cases than the nominative as well. It has been like this for a year or so. It's still not very far advanced yet, but Google apparently realized that they've got catching up to do.

Re:Gotta Love It

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, this is a non-story really. In Norway we have a search engine called Kvasir (kvasir.no) which is very good for Norwegian stuff. Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?

Kvasir use Google for net search, and add their own directory listings and stuff on top of it. No web search engine of their own (go to their page on how to get your site indexed, and they link you directly to Google [kvasir.no]). They did run a very successful marketing campaign hammering in the message that they where better at local stuff. And if you want the YP business listings and other extra they add, maybe.. but it is not a search engine competitor to Google, it is Google..

Re:Gotta Love It

[batje]

"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.

Re:Gotta Love It

[PRC Banker]

How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special. It would be news worth *if* Google was beating local searches in foreign areas.

Yes. In China Baidu [baidu.com] is the leader, though search is a general term covering searching many things for many people. Though apparently, Google.cn are very effective in serving and marketing to the higher revenue, more educated, higher earning customer sectors.

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.

Re:Gotta Love It

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Character sets?

[Cyberax]

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.