The article is a little light on the details which data was used and compiled - are the majority of Google hits due to that being a persons default url when they open their web browser?
Hey, this is the author of the post at The Atlantic. I thought I had linked to the research; it was totally my bad that in fact I hadn’t. It should be fixed now (or in the next 3 min, when our server refreshes).
EDIT: To be clear, too, I try to make it a policy to link to the original research in my articles, even if (alas) that research is sometimes behind a pay- or journalwall. It was an accident, and my fault, that it wasn’t first linked to here.
Living in Japan, it's not that surprising. Until a few years ago Yahoo had far superior services in Japan for things such as transit directions. I remember 5 years ago trying to get around Tokyo using Google Maps with no success, but the Yahoo counterpart worked perfectly despite being harder for me to use since the UI was in Japanese only. These days, Google has equal or better services (although Yahoo still has some services Google does not provide such as an auction house). But inertia keeps people on Yahoo and Yahoo Japan is still very good, also they have close deals with Softbank (mobile phone carrier) which helps them keeping people on their sites.
I wonder how Google missed that market - is that something Yahoo does better? That is, does Yahoo have better regional offices to take the local market? I know Google often drags their feet about going international with some products.
Yahoo came into Japan by selling part of them to Softbank (Son Masayoshi). This led them to be a separate entity to Yahoo Global. E.g. if you try to find a job in Yahoo Global you will not find jobs listed in Japan and vice versa.
Google came in thinking that they can implement US/Western practices which allowed them to be successful overseas. This unfortunately does not work.
Japan's market is very unique and very self sustaining. Due to the population and the way the people behave. For example Yahoo Auctions is still the number 1 auction website in the world whereas Ebay has never penetrated the market. And Ebay also has moved into the form of a marketplace over the last few years. Yahoo Auctions has largely not changed over the years.
Yahoo! Japan is it's own company that only focuses on the Japanese market. As far as I know Google does not have a setup like this. Yahoo! Japan is owned mostly by Softbank and Yahoo! (see other comment).
Wasn't Yahoo! Japan also a large ISP or major ISP partner? Concerning a canceled move many years ago, my limited searching found Yahoo branded internet was very prevalent and a darn good deal.
There is a brief explanation of the reasons behind that (with links to further information) in the article:
> Yahoo! succeeds in Japan and Taiwan through its nearly two-decade-old partnership with Japanese SoftBank and its 2007 purchase of Wretch, a Taiwanese social networking site.
That makes it sound 50/50, but it's more diluted than that - Yahoo Inc. only owns 35.15% of Yahoo Japan. Softbank owns a little more - 35.86%. The rest is owned by much smaller shareholders.
SBBM is Softbank as well, so Softbank actually owns over 42% of Yahoo! Japan. In practice it's really Softbank's internet content and portal service in Japan that also leverages Yahoo! Inc. technology as needed as well as their brand.
I didn't see Taiwan on the map by the way, but yeah it's a joke amongst my Taiwanese friends that you're not a true Taiwanese unless your browser homepage is http://tw.yahoo.com/
Living in Japan I can say that Yahoo Maps is number 1 in detail. Although Google Maps is catching up in terms of service and information now. And I also believe there is a market shift amongst younger people from Yahoo Japan.
Interesting that the most popular site in Kazakhstan is a russian site. (Mail.ru)
Another interesting thing to measure would be the most popular national website, ie. for denmark, the most popular .dk domain, and then represented in size per population.
EDIT: I'd hypothesize that the top website would be whatever bank has the most customers, or websites for government functions.
Or if you want real local websites, I would assume a newspaper or tv channel website (unless they all live in the .tv domain). Alexa seems to confirm this for Denmark: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/DK.
Considering the number of Russians I know from Kazakhstan, it doesn't surprise me that it's a Russian site. However, it's interesting that its mail.ru and not Yandex. And why VK in Belarus and not Yandex? I realize that VK is enormous and at least in the top 5 most visited sites in Russia.
No wonder why Google is trying to push Google+ so badly. Although I don't know what is worse, a world dominated by the New Google or by -the always full of controversy- Facebook.
It's not derogatory, just fact. The "aspie-ness" ramps down trivialities of the world and lets people hyper-focus on individual issues. When that hyper-focus is pointed towards "personal gain at all costs," the world suffers.
HFA people are, by definition, HF enough to operate coherently in the world. Sure, they may be considered "weird" or have no friends or wake up one morning and realize life has passed them by while they were hyper-focused on one thing for ten years, but they are still in and of the world.
It is not a predisposition. You are using a term that was actually deprecated this year as synonym of "hyper focussed" individuals which is actually just an stereotype, most people on the spectrum aren't hyper-focussed.
As an example, homosexuality once was considered a mental disorder and it is full of stereotypes. And I am sure that homosexual people would be very offended if someone starts using the term as a synonym of hiper-sexuality.
Also I am very sure that someone would say that is a fact based on anecdotical experience, and hence is not derogatory.
For me a misuse of a term using it as a cliché is indeed derogatory.
> Baidu dominates China, though its spill-over popularity into neighboring countries makes the researchers doubt whether data from those countries is accurate.
The data for Korea clearly isn't accurate. Baidu is almost unheard of in this country. Not many young people can even read Chinese. Naver, a local company, dominates 70% of the Korean search market and a significant portion of the social networking scene as well. Its anti-competitive behavior is currently a hot topic in Korea.
I suppose the anomaly is due to the fact that the authors used Alexa (mentioned in the bottom right of the second image). Hardly anyone in Korea has the Alexa toolbar installed. People here, like elsewhere, pollute their PCs with all sorts of other toolbars, but rarely Alexa. The language barrier probably plays a part. I wouldn't be surprised if those who do have Alexa (usually foreigners) tend to have ties to a certain neighboring country with a very large population.
It seems like the original research does mention this problem.
"At the same time, we see a puzzling fact that Baidu is also listed as the most visited website in South Korea (ahead of the popular South Korean search engine, Naver). We speculate that the raw data that we are using here are skewed."
> Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google).
Does that mean they aren't defining Google as Google properties? What would the map look like if they did?
Google would be defined as google.com (or the appropriate geo-specific domain) since this map is specifically for websites, not companies owning the most popular products .
As for what would happen if they did group by company? I'm guessing that Google would be #1 pretty much everywhere, save maybe Russia and China.
#1 People still install toolbars, that's crazy to me.
#2 Google has so many popular products (search, gmail, youtube, maps) that it makes sense that they're that big. It's equivalent to a person having a bank account with $1bil in it. Just leaving that money in the account and raking interest, you just continue to get bigger by being. In google's case, there isn't strong enough competition to stop them from "being" and gaining more share based on their prior efforts.
#3 Could a new US based search engine compete with Google? Or are they just that big that the task is a fool's errand?
#1 It is crazy and I see a toolbar on just about any average user computer. However, most people do not explicitly install them. They're being silently opted-in or gently coerced into it.
#2 and #3 Google is so influential that it's highly unlikely to happen on the current playfield. They either buy a potential competitor out or cripple their business. I can only see two opportunities for this: a) specialized niche search, b) search based on a new disruptive technology.
Take a look at DuckDuckGo (if you prefer independent entrepreneurial upstart) or Bing (if you prefer massive well funded corporate competitor) to see what getting in the ring with Google looks like.
Inflection points in technology open up opportunities for new competition once a mega company has won a space.
It's a fool's errand to try to beat Google at the game they've perfected and were built for. By the time you could very slowly wrest control of search from Google, the whole tech world will have changed and your point of competition will no longer matter. That's the foolishness of Bing, for example. It's great that companies still try to compete with them, but all they will accomplish is to keep making Google better (and that's a good thing for consumers); they won't 'beat' them however under any circumstances.
Google will be beat in search the same way Microsoft was in operating systems: a dramatic sea shift in technology (with Android now being by far the most important operating system going forward).
Indonesia and Malaysia aren't part of Oceania, nor are the British Isles.
'Oceania' is a way of saying "those Anglo countries that think they're part of South East Asia, but aren't. And we'll throw in the polynesians as well so it's not so obvious what we're doing...". So many times when I see references to 'Oceania', people are really just talking about Aus/NZ, and sometimes even just Aus.
