There are a lot of factoids in that article that sound impressive, but all the junk obscures the simple reason Yahoo Japan is such a massive success.
The Japanese internet is very small, compared to the english language internet, so when Google stepped in with just pagerank and no human-powered indexes, Yahoo's colloquial indexing was able to provide a better experience. Even today, any time I search in Japanese, google seems to provide much less useful results.
Honestly, this is one of the most well-written and well-researched articles I've seen on TechCrunch in a long time - excellent read, very interesting stuff there!
I disagree with one of the article's points: That Yahoo! outperforms Google in Japan. Reading the (poorly labeled) graph, we have the following numbers:
Yahoo! in Japan: 40-45k eyeballs
Google in Japan: 20-25k eyeballs
If all eyeballs are equivalent (ad money for a Google eyeball = ad money for a Yahoo eyeball), then Yahoo would be making around twice as much. However, they have this problem:
"Currently, Yahoo Japan is owned 40% by local telecommunications powerhouse SoftBank and 33% by Yahoo in the US, demonstrating a textbook perfect Japanese-foreign joint venture structure."
Ok, so Yahoo! effectively gets 1/3 of twice the market value that Google gets. So, how is Yahoo!'s localization and extra push from SoftBank helping Yahoo!?
Masayoshi Son was once the SECOND richest man in the world, after BillG, at 70 billion dollars!
The guy who ran Hikari Tsushin (mobile phones, internet) is even more interesting! He was worth about 40 billion at the Hong Kong bubble peak, and is now worth a lot less. But it's cool to be up there once!
[Edit] Relevance - Son owned a lot of Yahoo (not just Japan) and was worth tons for it.
#618 Yasumitsu Shigeta is the other guy, and is just up there due to being bubble cool!
I've always wondered about the dollar value of Yahoo's most obvious liability: The name "Yahoo". Perhaps the Japanese don't translate this into "Stupid Idiot".
That is a liability? As is the name "GoDaddy", right? You are quite ignorant about branding if you think that the name Yahoo is a liability. So what is your suggestion: best-search-engine-and-portal-online.com?
The Japanese internet is very small, compared to the english language internet, so when Google stepped in with just pagerank and no human-powered indexes, Yahoo's colloquial indexing was able to provide a better experience. Even today, any time I search in Japanese, google seems to provide much less useful results.