Top Search Engines: find out what they want & give it to them

Search engines allow us to find and filter out relevant information on the internet. If doing business is "to know what people want and give it to them", then successful search sites managed to get the correct formula.

Top three search sites register more than 90 percent of all search engine traffic. According to comScore's press release, Google takes 62.6%, Yahoo 18.9% and Microsoft (Bing/Live/MSN search) 12.7% in US.　Taking country-specific versions into account, dominance of the top three is replicated almost entirely to other countries.

It may be that the powerful search algorithms make these sites popular. Nonetheless, local taste, language nuance and cultural contexts seem to be other deciding factors.

According to iResearch China, the top search sites in China are: Baidu 百度 (76%), way ahead of Google (18.9%), followed by (Tencent's 腾讯) Soso 搜搜 (3.2%) and Sogou 搜狗 (0.9%). Baidu 百度 continues to lead the market with its online marketing innovations.

In the web search market of Japan, with first-mover advantage is Yahoo! Japan (Yahoo!カテゴリ), beating Google. It is operated by the Japanese telecommunications company Softbank.

As for the case of South Korea, local players Naver.com (네이버) and Daum.net (다음) account for 77% and 10% of the local web searches respectively.

e-Commerce vs e-BizCoy Matrix: information flow

Info provider & receiver matrix

		"Info Receiver"
		Customer (C)	Business (B)
"Info Provider"	Business (B)	B2C: Amazon.com Rakuten 楽天 Taobao 淘宝网	B2B: Alibaba soldouteasy.com IndiaMART
	Customer (C)	C2C: eBay Yahoo!オークション	C2B: YouTube Baidu.com Naver(네이버)

In the familiar e-Commerce matix, we have B2B, B2C, C2C, and also G2C, G2B, etc. Here, let us look beyond commercial transactions and view e-Business from a different angle: the initial "provider" & "receiver" of information.

"Info Provider": Business or Customer provides (1)information about their product/services that they want to sell, or (2)about things they want to search, or (3)information they want to share (such as news scoop, video clips, personal details about themselves).

"Info Receiver": Business or Customer reads and reacts to the information supplied above by (1)responding to buy the product/services, or (2)finding and organizing the answers, (3)providing an internet platform to enable exchange of information.

While B2C, B2B and C2C cover most of online commercial transactions, "C2B" includes useful websites such as search engines, social networks, blogs, etc. It is easy to see that C2B is where you find the highest traffic volume.