I am curious how www.seznam.cz resisted so long against google. I tried it and it does seem as fast as google and it has a suggest feature, also very snappy. However, I just searched for 'hello' and got a Goatse in the images.
Seznam used to be much better in searching czech terms. There aren't many differences now. Many people have seznam as their homepage because it contains news, e-mail and search.
As the article states, the numbers come from referals collected by Toplist, a Czech web stats service similar to Analytics. Not sure how that itself skewes the results. What’s more interesting is that Google only comes before its competior if you sum the numbers for google.cz with google.sk, its Slovakian version. I’m not sure why would we want to do that if we really wanted hard numbers for the Czech Republic only.
Seznam.cz itself (quite vehemently) claims that the numbers are not accurate and this claim isn't true. Still, there is a very clear downward trend with Seznam search and I don't know what can be done about it. Seznam search is most likely (technically) good enough to search the Czech web, but it doesn't cover anything outside that, it uses Bing for the rest of the world (in fact, it did use Google search for that, 5 years ago). But even if seznam.cz had 100% share of the Czech web search, that won't generate enough money to compete with Google (and seznam.cz has, in the Czech republic, still much greater revenues than Google). Also, it's not just search engine, seznam.cz has it's own freemail (still much more popular than gmail in the cz) or maps (mapy.cz, also more popular than google maps here). Personally, it everything feels like lagging at least 5 years behind Google. To illustrate, google maps can offer public transit routes and search here, in Brno, mapy.cz can't. There are salesmen that could easily make arrangements with the local transit company and make profit from it, but not enough developers to make it happen.
(I work at seznam.cz, not on anything search-related.)
The Czech Republic and Slovakia only recently (1993) split up.
Because of that, a reason could be that it is hard to split the statistics between those states because many Slovaks will use a Czechian search engine.
the other engines have only one site for the two countries, so that already have data for the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. They should have mentioned it.
They do mention the following, though: It beats the aggregate share of Seznam.cz and two other Seznam sites, so it seems that comparison at least is/may be fair.
Toplist calculates google's versions in Czech republic. People in Czech Republic use other versions of Google too. For example slovaks in Czech Republic use google.sk, Germans in Czech Republic use Google.de etc etc. Thats why its a fair calculation, since it doesnt calculate google.sk which is used by slovaks in Slovakia
If the marketing campaign was that effective in Czech Republic, that might explain the recent increase in marketing from Google here in Tokyo since 2011 started.
I can't remember how many times I saw the same Google Chrome commercials over and over during the first days of the year, and I also noticed and increase in Google related advertising inside of the trains, etc...
It could helped Google to get rid of some kind of unfamiliarity and a notion of being "that strange foreign thing". Seznam.cz is completely ubiquitous, when you had connected your modem and fired up the web browser for the first time, it would be the first place to go. If seznam.cz homepage didn't work for a while, you'd assume that "my internet is broken". Even a computer professional would just ping seznam.cz if he wanted to know whether the connection is ok.
Things (for a mass public) gets very different when you see a TV ad. (Before 2006 or so, google didn't even try to claim google.cz domain name, which was by that time occupied by some squatters or something.)
