Yahoo Japan gives more weight to business sites
When you search using the same words in Yahoo Japan (Yahoo) and
Google Japanese (Google), the results are quite different. It seems
that the greatest difference is that Yahoo gives more weight to
business sites than to community sites.
For example, when I searched for “Hawaii golf,” (in Japanese) I found that the top 4 sites on Yahoo’s top results page are business sites. The 5th ranking site is a a guide book type community site. On Google, in contrast, thefirst 3 sites listed are community sites.
This difference is probably a reflection of Yahoo’s “Business
Express.” For charging a fee of nearly $500 (or even double in
some cases) for registering a site, it ought to provide some ranking boost in return!
For businesses, it’s a good thing that Yahoo Japan is the most used
search engine in Japan. For Japanese language search users, it’s good to be aware of this difference between Yahoo and Google. If you are looking for products and services, use Yahoo. Otherwise, check out Google as well.