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Japan’s Possible Google Monopoly, Google’s Mobile Search Dominance, And More

Japan To Potentially Choose Google For Good

In a move that is sure to wreak havoc on the recent Yahoo-Bing alliance, Japan recently announced it would switch to Google as its primary search provider. This was made possible because Yahoo only owns 35% of the site’s shares, while Softbank, a Japanese Internet service provider and cell phone provider empire, owns 40% of Yahoo Japan. This move is made all the more significant because Japan currently is the third highest web search using country in the world.

There will be expected opposition from Microsoft and Japanese regulators because Google would come close to monopolizing the web search market in Japan. Currently Yahoo Japan occupies more than 53% of the Japanese search market while Google’s search volume falls in at 38%.

Google Dominates Mobile Search

According to Royal Pingdom and data from StatCounter, Google owns close to 100% of the shares in global mobile marketing. The actual total is 98.29%, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt is confident that number will remain high as more smartphones make their way into the consumer market.

“If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that?” Schmidt said.

Google has increased their reign over mobile web search since last year, when they controlled 95.58% of the market. It will be interesting to see if the company manages to top the 99% mark by the end of the year, especially with the potential increase in Android sales.

Google Develops A Facebook Rival

In more Google-related news, the search engine empire is speaking with many popular online game developers in order to potentially create a social networking service able to compete with Facebook called Google Me.

The game making companies include Playdom, Inc. (Overdrive, Poker Palace), Electronic Arts Inc.’s Playfish and Zynga Game Network Inc. (Farmville, Mafia Wars). It may be hard for Google to compete directly with Facebook, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted that the company doesn’t plan on duplicating the 500 million person social network.

“The world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing,” Schmidt said. He also said that Facebook is beneficial to Google, and that “Facebook users use more Google products than any other users.”

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