Baidu ranked no. 4 in Japanese search

Behind Yahoo Softbank, Google and MSN, and
ahead of all the many local search players.
According to research data from an
independent Japanese polling organization,
Video Research, from Jan 23rd when baidu.jp
officially launched, to Feb 22nd, their
pageviews have steadily increased. They are
the #1 in image and video search in Japan
now.

Baidu's biggest advantage seems to be raw
speed, orders faster at the initial search
than both Yahoo and Google. Probably due
to fresh new hardware for the servers, and
better support for dualbyte character
coding widely used in CJK (China, Japan
and Korea). In these systems, a character
is 1 byte if from the Latin alphabet, and
2 byte if from the local alphabet.
Many Western international companies
prefer to develop Unicode (flat
16-bit encoding for all characters for all
languages) based systems. None of the
search companies release hard facts on
exactly how their character coding systems
work, though.

A secondary advantage is a clean search
result page with no ads. Baidu plans to
attract traffic and loyal users this
way, before deciding how best to include
ads.

Users also say Baidu's website is simple,
user-friendly and search results
fast and comprehensive. This has to be
considered a severe blow to Google's
long-term future.

Marbridge Daily report