Is Baidu bringing their search engine to Japan? What of that Japanese government search engine that was in the works?

Originally published at Japan Economy News

The METI Search Engine

Back in December of 2005, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry organized a study group comprised of about 20 Japanese electronics companies and universities, which was supposed to consider the merits of creating a search engine designed specifically for Japan’s Web users. Asia Media reported that the study group would include such giants as Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Hitachi, NEC and Fujitsu, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and public broadcaster NHK.

Also at that time, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Japan’s effort would be aimed at competing with Google. That interested me, since Yahoo is by far and away the search/internet portal market share leader in Japan. Google, of course, is the company that everyone thinks of as being cutting edge. Oh yeah, and Google makes heaps of money.

In April 2006, similar reports surfaced. Again an official at the Ministry of Trade Economy and Industry announced that a study group would be set up, and that, “The group will look into issues including whether Japan will start its own search engine.”

This time, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that the government was planning to spend several billions of yen “for a three-to-five year project to develop a search engine beginning in fiscal 2007.”

Fumihiro Kajikawa, a ministry official in charge of information policies at the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry told reporters, “It is not that we want to play against (Google and Yahoo). We are thinking of something that’s unique to Japan.”

Ten months after that second article, news on a METI/Japan search engine has gone dark, but now there’s reason it could actually happen…

Baidu

According to Alexa’s Global Top 500 site ranking, Baidu.com is the fourth most popular site on the web, coming in just after Google and just before You Tube. Yesterday, Baidu announced that its quarterly profits had quintupled, and that it would continue with plans to invest $15 million to get the Japanese version of its search engine up and running.

Baidu, of course, is aware of the difficulties involving such a project. As Shaun Rein, managing director of Shanghai-based China Market Research Group, put it:

There are a lot more embedded competitors in the Japanese market than in China [when Baidu got started]. [In China,] Baidu wasn’t really competing against anyone with a strong position. [In Japan,] Baidu is going against people who really know the local market.

That’s true, though the big players in Japan (Yahoo, Google and MSN) are, of course, of American origin. They have managed to run their Japanese operations quite well, especially in the case of Yahoo Japan (which is run by Masayoshi Son’s Softbank), which took advantage of its ability to build a Web portal that allows Japanese users to find the information that matters to them (weather, train times, maps, etc).

Back to METI

The next few weeks should be interesting. Will the possible entrance of a Chinese competitor finally inspire METI to get its act together and get a project running? Is it possible to retain the flexibility needed to run a successful search engine while attempting to enlist 20 organizations to cooperate? Or - and this is what this observer is hoping for - will a Japanese start-up enter the fray and attempt to brand itself into the Japanese source for search?

Stay tuned…

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