Yahoo Remains Big In Japan (& Beating Google)

While stats out from Hitwise today show Google still reigns supreme in the United States, in Japan, it’s a different story. Yahoo remains the top search engine there, the latest stats from comScore show, and it’s growing faster than Google. comScore reports Yahoo is still leading, in a major way, in Japan. Yahoo holds over 51 percent of search market share in Japan, where Google only holds 38 percent. Japanese searchers also search more at Yahoo then other search engines with 62 searches per searcher, where Google has 53 searches per searcher.

Yahoo’s property of sites accounted for 3.5 billion searches in January 2009, up 13 percent from the previous year. Google Sites had 2.6 billion searches, up 5 percent and Rakuten had 153 million searches, up 38 percent from the previous year.

Meanwhile, Hitwise reports Google had 72 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in January 2009. Yahoo Search had 17.8 percent share, MSN Search had 5.4 percent share and Ask.com 3.3 percent share.