Internet in China: More Searches from China, but Koreans Search more often

by Itamar Medeiros | June 25, 2008 | 0 Comments

South Korea’s Internet searchers conducted an average of 104 searches in April/2008, nearly twice as many as Malaysians, who clocked in at 54 searches per searcher in April, according to Comscore’s latest findings. Perhaps the Malaysians should help the South Koreans find what they are looking for?

Asia’s largest number of searches, not surprisingly, came from the 82 million Chinese Internet users doing 6.2 billion searches in April. That is an average of 75 searches per Chinese searcher.

Search intensity get even more interesting with China vs Japan:

Japan’s 60 million Internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher). Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.

Another aspect of Asia’s Internet shown by the Comscore report is how local search sites challenge Google and Yahoo.

Across Asia, Google sites have a 39.1 percent share and Yahoo sites have a 24 percent share, but five of the region’s top ten search properties are local, including China’s Baidu.com (16.7 percent) and Korea’s NHN Corporation (5.3 percent), which owns search engine Naver.com.

The report adds:

Chinese properties Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.