Jobs, Mobiles and Travel have become the metaphorical roti, kapda and makaan (or bijli, sadak and pani) of Yahoo Search in India. A press release by the company on Yahoo’s “Top 10 Most Popular Search Keywords” report. Jobs seem to be most sought after, with Travel and Mobile Phones following at a close second and third. Fourth is Matrimony. Other facts currently available:
-
Nokia Mobile and Broadband are other popular keywords
-
Naukri was ranked at No. 1 among job portals followed by Monster.com and Monster Jobs.
-
Across Asia, the No. 1 keyword is ‘travel’, next comes ‘gaming’.
-
In Hong Kong, the top most popular searches were ‘after -school tutoring programs’ and ‘English training programs’, an indication of how English is being recognized across Asia as the harbinger of opportunity.
Gauging from the ‘Top 5 Growing Businesses in Search Marketing’, travel and tourism, education and medical cosmetology were the fastest growing businesses from the search Marketing perspective. A possible indication of the South Asian mindset – very likely.
The report is quite indicatory of the trends on the Internet. What remains to be seen is how much of this data Yahoo! Search can actually leverage. It isn’t news that Yahoo’s market share in Search is falling – with Bing being the new rising star. Though comScore reports from July actually have Yahoo gaining 0.4% , it’s well known that Yahoo has been attempting to move away from search technology for the last few years. In 2008, they attempted a deal with Google for search relevant ads, which was blocked by US authorities since that would give Google a virtual monopoly over the US market. However, just a week or so ago, Yahoo! Japan announced that Yahoo search in Japan would be powered by Google. Quite shortly, the parent company in USA (which has only a 35% stake in its Japanese counterpart) announced that in all other countries, Yahoo would be tying up with Microsoft’s Bing. The switch to Bing has been made for USA. Other countries would finish the transition by 2012.
The move drew quite some criticism from several netizens who felt Yahoo was wimping out of search. This provoked a response in the form of a blog post from Yahoo! Search with Shashi Seth Senior Vice President, Yahoo! Search Products claiming that Yahoo Search was not completely powered by Microsoft and that Yahoo was only combining its own resources with Bing’s web crawlers. It also mentions that Yahoo! is investing in many areas that will redefine and reshape search.
There seems to be a bit of evasive ambiguity in the tone of the blog. It first states that search is not just about indexing, crawling and relevance of web documents. It then boasts about its own capabilities to do the same (in under a second) without defining what role Yahoo will play if Bing will also do the same.
A point to be noted is that Bing specializes in the travel vertical when it come to search. If travel is the most searched term in Asia, this bodes well for the alliance. Quite coincidentally, there was a post in TechCrunch on how Google needs to starts exploiting niche markets before they get sidetracked. If you did your travel search a specific place, your shopping elsewhere, looked for restaurants at a different search engine (all known for their fortes), Google simply remains the place where you search for random things. And I doubt there are many companies out there who’d want to advertise to people who’re just “Googling Along”.
Ehh. I still use Google. I’v tried Bing (Set it as Omnibar search and homepage) but when searching the results where not as easy to find and get through as Google. But at least it’s more publicity and stuff for MS.