Comments on: 5 Countries Stand Between Google and World Domination

By: GRW

GRW — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:13:42 +0000

Google was not focused really on czech republic and can’t really compete on market so different from other countries. Main failures:

- lack of czech interface for long time
- lack of localised (czech relevant) results. seznam.cz was better able to display valid results for czech queries even with worse technology
- google.cz domain owned by czech speculant
- seznam.cz took advantage of yellow pages tradition and became no.1 link directory with paid business directory
- good marketing campaign of seznam.cz (seznam.cz became start web page for non techy people)

By: AdaMM

AdaMM — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:35:41 +0000

(^other two = baltic countries, latvia and lithuania)

By: AdaMM

AdaMM — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:34:56 +0000

i’m not really sure, but one other country i found with dominant local search engine was Estonia (neti.ee) and i wonder about the other two. also if google is not dominant on russian market, what about the countries from former soviet union? are they all using google or are there other players, especially yandex, dominant? i guess rather the statistics are missing or hard-to-get, so it was not presented.

By: krdr

krdr — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:03:19 +0000

I know why google made success in former Yugoslav states. For long time, krstarica.com was tool of choice for us. Then Google cam with better results and more hits. As we usually use US keybords (without language specific characters, Google understands that Uzice and Užice are same word. Now it recognize declinations: Uzice is same as Užicu,Užica,Užicu… There SE with similar capabilities, but now is late… Google just have product to better suits our needs

By: rsteven

rsteven — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:39:18 +0000

emmm why do you think that Google has more than 50% share in each of these countries? There could be multiple players and Google simply has the majority.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:38:52 +0000

According to this http://www.thomascrampton.com/media/googles-tiny-market-share-of-search-in-asia/

(not sure of the reliability of this source yet, mind…) Taiwan is counted separately.

I’d be surprised if anyone other than China itself would lump Taiwan’s internet statistics in with China’s. Given China’s draconian internet usage controls and a reasonable proportion of their vast population online, I’d imagine their statistics skew worldwide statistics by some margin. Taiwan is tiny by comparison, but with a demography, political environment, Internet behaviour and access akin to that in Japan, Europe, the States etc.

By: mejiac

mejiac — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:15:05 +0000

I have two comments:

The first is that Google should consider the country’s culture to better understand there needs…something probably marketting is already on top off.

The Second is regarding Mohammad Gawdat comments…one should never feel confortable with there current position. Google is doing ok NOW…but who knows what can happend in today’s fast paste world

Regards

By: HBDM9

HBDM9 — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:00:20 +0000

I am not Number Six, but All This Has Happened Before, All This Will Happen Again, and again, and again, each time, a promising little spinet of technology, revolutionize on a ever repeating cycle. So I am not surprised.