Markets where Google is not a synonym of search
The New York Times this morning runs an article on Google competing in the Russian market. Despite grand entrance, the company failed (yet) to establish itself as the leading search brand, mainly due to (a) complexity of the languages from the Cyrillic family, and (b) not being first to market.
According to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, 28 percent of Russian Internet users on home or office computers visited Google sites in October, making Google the eighth-biggest Internet brand.
What’s interesting is not as much Google losing to Mail.ru, one of the largest online portals with free e-mail and other services effectively replicating Yahoo!’s horizontal structure in Russia, but Google losing to Yandex.ru, a search brand expanding into related services such as mail, news and maps only after reaching domination in search industry. Yandex has been visited by 64% of Russian Internet users, Google reached 28.5% penetration.
Russia is not the only market where Google has (yet) failed to achieve dominance in the core market - search. Seznam is a heavy player in Czech Republic search market, where Google achieved nominal presence. Seznam has a combination of the language understanding and local features that are either too complicated or too specialized for Google to replicate, as admittedly Czech Republic is not that big of an Internet market to engage a major investment of resources by the Mountain View giant. Seznam also enjoys a decent first-mover advantage.
Naver is the leading search player in South Korea, which just goes to show you how different cultures produce different experiences for Internet searching. Naver is built around question-answer model, and with Korean ultra-high broadband penetration and always-on connection the idea of getting your questions instantly answered by a group of similar-minded individuals seem to work much better than weeding through the search results page. Yahoo! was quick to notice the Korean phenomenon, which led to launch of Yahoo! Answers, which became a pretty successful site as far as traffic numbers (I haven’t seen any data on Y! Answers monetization).