Become Japan

What will become of it?

[zCat]

I just noticed the BecomeBot is hitting my Japanese site again, with great intensity, but the Japanese Become site
(co.jp, not just .jp) is still the same as when I last looked, i.e. with nothing much apart from links to the English version of the site and a press release in Japanese dated to October 2005.

Anyone heard any news since then?

[bill]

They are still listed as beta on the Japanese site. I haven't heard too much about them since their debut [webmasterworld.com]. Aside from their robot are you getting any traffic from them? A quick water-cooler survey with Japanese co-workers drew nothing but blank/confused stares. ;)

[zCat]

No traffic, and the bot seems to have gone away again.

Thanks for the feedback.

[bill]

I'd expect the only thing that would boost awareness of that engine in Japan would be a blanket media campaign of some sort. They aren't particularly good enough to generate any sort of spontaneous ground-roots campaign ala Google. I don't see anything spectacular in their SERP relevancy in either English or Japanese that would make me want to use them on a regular basis...but they are still in beta.

[zCat]

but they are still in beta.

Aha, they've obviously launched the beta site in the last few days; when I made my original post, the site was still displaying a link to a press release. I'll have a poke around and see if it's useful for anything.

They seem to have an AJAXy "dainamikku sajesuchon" which despite what it implies on the startpage also works with Mozilla.

[bill]

That may explain my less than stellar experience in Opera. ;) I always hate to break IE out of mothballs just to use a SE. FireFox will have to do for the time-being.