History of Search Engines in Japan
Part of the reasons for Yahoo! Japan's dominance in Japan lies in the history.
1995
Several search engines were developed by college students in Japan and used by the public.
1996
Yahoo! Japan was established by Tokyo-based Softbank and Yahoo Corporation and started their search service in the Japanese language. Yahoo! Japan's search service was based on what they called "category search" in which website owners registered their websites and Yahoo! Japan's human editors manually constructed a directory. With the advantage of ample resource to operate this labor-intensive system, Yahoo! Japan gained the number one search service position in no time. In the early years Yahoo! Japan awarded an icon of red glasses to websites as their editor's choice and it was prestigious to receive this icon next to the listing of your website.
1997
Due to an explosive increase in the number of websites, "category search" system started to fall behind. In contrast, robot or crawler based search engines such as Infoseek and goo started to gain popularity.
1998
Yahoo! Japan formed a partnership with goo, a search engine operated by NTT Resonant, a 100% subsidiary of NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation). If a search at Yahoo! Japan yielded no result in its manually constructed directory, goo would take over as a default search provider and display its results within Yahoo! Japan's result page.
2000
Google introduced their service in Japanese language and quickly gained popularity. Google is characterized by its clean, simple interface and its focus on search service while Yahoo! Japan aimed to be an overall portal.
2001
Yahoo! Japan switched its default search provider from goo to Google.
2004
Yahoo! Japan terminated its partnership with Google Japan. Toshikazu Inoue, VP Search, Yahoo! Japan explains the reason for this decision on his blog as follows. "The reason is simple. Search engine is an important business that is highly profitable. We shouldn't rely on another company's technology for our core business." Search engine is profitable - that is the fact that Google proved with Adwords, a pay-per-click advertisement program. In May, Yahoo! Japan started developing Yahoo Search Technology (YST).
2010
In July 2010, Yahoo Japan announced that it will start using Google's search technology instead of YST. While Yahoo US will switch from YST to Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo Japan chose Google as its partner. Yahoo Japan says the search results are not going to be the same between Google and Yahoo Japan because Yahoo Japan will customize Google's search results and add its own data output to the search result pages. The term of the partnership agreement is two years.