Japanese Government Looks To Develop Own Search Engine

[Brett_Tabke]

[informationweek.com...]

Japan will look into launching its own Internet search engine, a government official said Monday, signaling the country's interest in a market dominated by powerhouses Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will kick off a study group consisting about 20 Japanese electronics companies and universities on Internet search engines, said Fumihiro Kajikawa, a ministry official in charge of information policies.

[newindpress.com...]

TOKYO: The Japanese government is teaming up with electronic, telecommunication and media companies in the country as well as universities to develop an Internet search engine to give Google some competition, a media report said on Monday.

[edited by: Woz at 9:00 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2005]
[edit reason] Fixed Scrollism [/edit]

[Rugles]

I wonder if that has anything to do with this spider I saw today...

ichiro/2.0

[larryhatch]

Ichiro has been visiting for months if not years,
It usually takes a very few pages and leaves. -Larry

[ddogg]

Lol I was going to mention the ichiro bot too. That thing crawls me pretty good but I have no clue as to what it is as their site is in Japanese. I've been waiting for a surge in Japanese traffic for months here ;-)

[walkman]

is the Govt' the right entity to develop a search engine? What has happened to Japan?

[bill]

There have been several publicly funded Japanese organizations that have been running spiders for years, so there have been aspirations in this direction for quite a long time. Unfortunately, to date there have not been any successful natively designed engines in Japan. All of the best ones have been derived from foreign technology. None of the native efforts were commercially successful in the face of the Yahoo and Google engines.

There may be a sense of frustration in Japan that they have been unsuccessful at making a good SE to find information in their own language. There certainly have been some very workable efforts in the name of academia and research, but nothing ever gained momentum with the general public.

Will something like this catch on? That's hard to say at this stage. The Japanese government has historically had a tremendous amount of influence in economic affairs. This certainly is nothing new in that respect, but the Japanese have traditionally been better on the hardware rather than the software side of things. I wish them well in their efforts as the Japanese SE market could use the invigoration.

[David_M]

Isn't goo powered by NTT's search engine?
(NTT is the government owned telephone monopoly)

[bill]

Goo is a portal owned by NTT, but they have not used their own search technology exclusively. For many years goo was the Japanese Inktomi arm. They even powered Yahoo Japan for a while. Right around the time that Yahoo Japan switched to their own SE goo had begun serving up Google SERPs. They may be working toward their own technology, but until now they have been using hybrids of other people's.

[ron_ron]

With old-boy companies like Matsushita, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC and NTT, it is unlikely they will come up with anything remarkable. I am sure it will prove to be a great waste of our tax money.

[edited by: bill at 1:43 am (utc) on Dec. 23, 2005]
[edit reason] tidying up [/edit]

[bill]

Well, it may give them something a bit more constructive to do than the endless make-work construction projects you see everywhere. If this means a few less rivers will be cemented over or needless dam projects started then I'm all for it. ;)

As I alluded to above, none of these companies are particularly renowned for their prowess in software development. They have proud histories reflecting their accomplishments in manufacturing and infrastructure development, but I don't have much confidence in their ability to develop software.

It's a bit early to say anything now as they've only agreed to discuss the project. I have a feeling that that's going to take a while. ;)

[cyberryo]

ichiro was discussed in earlier thread [webmasterworld.com...]