Google 10th most popular SE in Japan

According to Nielsen/NetRatings

[whats up skip]

"Asia is an entirely different story. The company was No. 3 in Hong Kong and only No. 10 in Japan, a major Internet powerhouse, according to Nielsen/NetRatings."

This is news to me.

Found this in the following article: [sfgate.com...]

It was lead feature on the www.news.com site.

Has anyone been able to find the report from Nielsen/NetRatings that actually shows this?

[bill]

The Nielsen ratings are a bit weird, but probably accurate for the way they measure things. They're estimating the number of unique visitors to various sites based on a small sampling of the population who allow themselves to be tracked. I'd take their numbers with a grain of salt.

For August 2004 here's what they show:
site, # of unique visitors, % reach, (time per person)

1. Yahoo! 29,960,000 84.05% (2:54:34)
   
2. Rakuten 21,144,000 59.32% (0:51:04)
   
3. MSN 19,255,000 54.02% (0:30:12)
   
4. Nifty 17,635,000 49.47% (0:27:22)
   
5. Global Media Online 15,531,000 43.57% (0:31:04)
   
6. Microsoft 15,063,000 42.26% (0:05:36)
   
7. NEC 14,665,000 41.14% (0:19:32)
   
8. Sony 12,576,000 35.28% (0:13:41)
   
9. NTT Communications 12,111,000 33.97% (0:15:05)
   
10. Amazon 10,215,000 28.66% (0:10:26 )

You can see that the top sites are all portals. A lot of these top portals are set as people's start pages by their providers. Others are heavily trafficked shopping sites. So, when they say Google is in the top ten they aren't comparing search engine popularity they're comparing Google.co.jp to Yahoo Japan and the rest. What they fail to state is that of those ISP portal sites in the top ten a majority of them use Google's results for their own custom search engines.

The people who wrote this article were obviously looking for some facts to support their article. It's clear to me that they know little of the Japanese market and are just throwing Nielsen figures around without really knowing about their background.

Google Japan is not a portal site. Japanese portal sites are very popular one-stop destinations for a lot of people. A lot of this traffic is due to the simple fact that most of the companies listed here run ISP portals which are set as people's default home pages when they sign up. The Google site itself doesn't get a lot of traffic compared to these sites, BUT a lot of these sites use Google's SE. So, the Nielsen figures are correct for the way they measure things, but not in terms of SE use.