“Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “However, there are several strong, local country search engines that also play a significant role in the region. Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China.”

What interesting is that 5 out of the Top 10 Search Properties in Asia-Pacific (April 2008) were the region based engines such as Korea’s Naver and China’s Alibaba.

comScore’s data also shows the country by country breakdown of Internet audience in the region. China ranks #1 with 82,814,000 unique searchers and Japan ranks #2 with 60,050,000 unique searchers. Korean searchers have most number of searches per searcher (103.5) followed by Japan’s 102.6 searches per searcher.

• Introduction to the South-Korean web series
• A profile of the connectivity in South Korea
• Why so little Korean web companies get ‘Techcrunched’
• Introduction to five popular Korean websites
Social community Cyworld a trendsetter in E-commerce?

It looks like he will continue the series to give us an overview of the main search engines in the country, Naver.cm, Daum.net, Empas.com and Nate.com.

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70).

The report also found that in terms of worldwide search property, MSN has now lost third position to the Chinese engine Baidu. Korea’s Naver has also made a strong appearance at 5th place.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.

Source: ComScore

1. China: .cn (402% increase)

2. Russia: ru

3. South Korea: .kr

China (.cn) has now become the fifth most popular country code extension globally, as Yahoo! finance points out, this was no doubt helped by an aggressive price cutting promotion this year

The price promotion - which reduced the fee to register a website domain name to approximately 14 cents Cdn for the first year - led to a 402 per cent growth in domain names registered with “.cn” from the previous year.

Korea has also been given a boost by the release of the first level extension, .kr this spring. Until then only second level versions of the domain had been available (most popular being co.kr).

Interestingly there have been no price or regulation changes to Russian domains (.ru) over this period.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

ICANN has recently also given a domain identity to Palestine - .ps.

The domains will cover China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other asian countries.

The 8 countries are:-

In 2008 it is estimated that 17.2% of marketing spend in the UK will dedicated to online and online will be ahead of cinema and outdoor forms of advertising and not far behind radio. Smaller advertisers in particular are to benefit from the affordability and targeting capabilities of the internet (which means ’search’ to you and me!!)

Internet advertising expenditure is to rise globally by 84% between 2005 and 2008.

The results presented have raised some questions, however the trend is there for all to see.

Read/Write Web provides information on users behaviour and top web 2.0 applications for the following countries:

• Germany
• Korea
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Russia
• UK

Google was accused by a Korean community site(www.humoruniv.com) of not paying the Korean site for having Google’s AdSense on its Web site for two months. The site was supposed to receive a check of around 20 million won, but only received an e-mail from Google saying that it terminated the contract because the site violated the program’s rules raising the number of clicks. Google refused to give evidence saying it is its “corporate policy to keep secret how the detecting system works.’’

The humoruniv web site has been flooded with negative comments and there are many claims from other web sites that were treated in the same way by Google after running Google’s AdSense.

The Korea Times

Naver is Korea’s No. 1 search portal service. The Naver search engine currently controls more than 68 percent of local search traffic, according to industry figures. Naver’s popularity relies on its question-and-answer type search tool Knowledge Search, which allows users to answer and edit search results. The Korean search marketplace is dominated by question-and-answer type search services, which tend to have stronger customer loyalty than general Web search services.

Brazilian Portuguese
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Korean
Russian
Simplified Chinese
Spanish
Traditional Chinese

Sitemap submisssion is not limited by the language of the site, as always.

Source: Inside Google Sitemaps

The key details are that the system enables you to express preferences for the sex, age and other criteria relating to the advertiser’s target audience - something which MSN needed to help it compete with Google and Yahoo - and to appeal to big brand advertisers.

France is next and the system has already been set-up to operate in the French language. This should be launched in the next few weeks, according to Eva Balan, who is responsible for the project and where the minimum click will be set at 5 cents in Euro. A pilot is also expected in the US in October.

MSN Singapore - Advertising

AdCenter Sign-up Page

MSN AdCenter lancé à Singapour (Abondance actu - mardi 6 septembre 2005)

Digital Media Asia: News - Internet traffic growth slows down dramatically in 2005 – report

The three countries combined represent 30% of all internet users worldwide.

AsiaMedia :: KOREA: Korea, China, Japan agree to tackle Internet troubles