Search engine markets shares in Asia

Posted on April 8, 2008
Filed Under online marketing |

Recent global market shares of search engines (I/2008, netapplications.com):

global-search-engine-market-share

Broken down into Asian countries, Google’s markets share looks like this:

google asia market shares

I did some research and compared the positions of the search engines in the following Asian markets. If available I added the rough percentages in market share, sometimes the available numbers vary really heavily. Total percentage per country can exceed 100% as users use more than one search engine (depends on the source). Anybody got better, more accurate or additional numbers, just post them, I’ll update the chart.

Country No.1 % No.2 % No.3 %
China Baidu +60% Google 20% Yahoo 10%
Taiwan Yahoo 60% Google 18% MSN 10%
Hongkong Yahoo Google 25%
Japan Yahoo 65% Google 25% -
South-Korea Naver 75% Daum 10% Yahoo 5%
Singapore Google 57% Yahoo 20% -
India Google 80%
Malaysia Google 51% MSN
Vietnam Google 90% Bamboo Yahoo
Philippines Yahoo 85% Google MSN

It is very obvious that Google’s global market share is nurtured by high market shares in the US and EU. In some parts of Asia local search engines and Yahoo are often preferred. Why is that?

Possible reasons:

  • missing language adaptation, Google mainly dominates English-speaking countries
  • poor management skill, read the comments of this article
  • local search engines better serve the desires of the search engine users. Example: Naver in Korea with a total different search result page layout that’s been copied by Google

It is also interesting that e.g. in Vietnam Google is the market leader whereas in the Philippines Yahoo obviously leads the market. And both countries are not English language dominated, I suppose. Any explanations for that?

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Comments

8 Responses to “Search engine markets shares in Asia”

  1. David Temple on April 11th, 2008 8:39 am

    Great post, I’ve been trying to get some of those Asia search numbers myself so good job in gathering them. Those numbers look pretty to close to what I have and I don’t have any to add but I’m still looking. thanks, dt

  2. diederik bijlsma on April 21st, 2008 12:56 pm

    nice overview indeed, regarding your question about philippines, the country’s second language is english, I think that in urban areas 90% of the people speak english almost fluent. Vietnam I cannot explain with 100% certainty but I read on wikipedia that english is second language and obligatory on schools nowadays.

  3. RedThumb on May 7th, 2008 8:42 am

    It could also has something to do with the first-mover advantage in any countries although it does not necessarily always apply. For example, ebay entered China way before China’s local-grown counterpart (i.e. TaoBao), yet TaoBao eventually beat ebay by thousand miles. I personally don’t think there are certain universal reasons that apply to all countries on why a certain search engine wins over the other search engines. In fact, each win-over case would allow us to write a few pages of its behind-the-scene story.

  4. Thomas Crampton on May 20th, 2008 10:18 am

    Great numbers! I am searching for some now myself.

    Did you get any newer/better numbers lately?

    I did an interview with Employee number 2 at Yahoo in Hong Kong about why they succeeded against Google. Will be posting it shortly.

  5. admin on May 20th, 2008 2:22 pm

    No better numbers so far, they are really hard to find. Looking forward to your post. Will check your blog regularely.

  6. James on August 24th, 2008 8:38 am

    thanks for the information. However, I am a bit skeptical on the statistic on Google in Malaysia is only 51 %. I think it should be at least 60 % because most of the people I know , they are using Google rather than Yahoo

  7. อบรมseo on January 22nd, 2009 11:49 am

    Excellent! Thanks for doing this…it’s really nice to know that I’m not alone on a lot of these things.

  8. David on August 31st, 2009 7:10 pm

    The reason why Yahoo has the highest market share in Taiwan is because Yahoo acquired Kimo in year 2000 (http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release643.html). Kimo was the #1 search engine in Taiwan before the acquisition

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