no more free ride on goo

goo to stop free service March 31

[bill]

I just caught the end of a news report on Japanese TV that announced goo [goo.ne.jp] would be stopping free service on March 31, and starting a new paid service called hoops I have no idea how they'll spell this name, but it sounded like hoops or oops to me...

There was no detail about what they would be charging for or how much. I didn't see anything on the goo page or the NTT-X site, the owner of goo, but I'm sure something will be up next week. It sounded like goo would be following in the footsteps of Inktomi and Fast with paid spidering...but I'm just guessing at this stage ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

It still has the ink logo on the serps.

[Woz]

Maybe they are giong to use their own Paid database primarily and them fall back in INk, or whatever, as a backup.

Most of the engines that have gone PFI are either Global or Regional in focus rather than specifically targeting one country. Bill, do you thing there is enough of a market in Japan to support PFI there? It will be interesting to see the results.

Onya
Woz

[bill]

The big change won't happen till April 1. It may be a bit early Monday AM here...but I don't see news of this yet. It may have been a leak I saw.

Bill, do you thing there is enough of a market in Japan to support PFI there?

Some of the big players here Yahoo! Japan and LookSmart have been charging to be listed in their directories for a while now. Although this is not PFI in the sense that you're asking Woz, I do think that to some extent it has primed the market to expect to pay to be on the search engines and directories. We've also heard that Overture will be starting up here soon as well...PFI could work very well here.

goo is still a major player here among the robot driven engines, and if they start a PFI program it's my assumption that people will pay. The Japanese market is becoming a bit more SE savvy, and the people marketing SEO type services have been watching the US-European markets. I get the impression that they've been expecting this for some time now. It was inevitable that this would happen in Japan.

[bill]

[big]False Alarm[/big]

Sorry about that. There was no official news posted about this until today [goo.ne.jp]. It seems that goo will just stop providing free portal services like chat, messaging, websites, and other "community" type services from April. There was nothing mentioned about free robot spidering.

phew

[Woz]

He he he !

[keikei]

Goo is simply dropping all of free services that simply eat out their operation costs. The same happened to another Japanese portal ISIZE (http://www.isize.com/) recently. Those Japanese portals, just like many others all over the world, are focusing on money-making contents and services.

This is part of the reason why Google is dominating the Japanese market. Simply those Japanese portals do not have enough resources to build search engines... Goo (Inktomi-based) and Infoseek Japan (infoseek-based?), and Fresheye are the last resorts.

As for PFI I'm extremely curious in this development in Japan. I think there is enough market in Japan, but I wonder if Japanese users accept this type of search engines.