I came across an interesting article that stated China search giant Baidu would enter Japan’s search market in 2007. The company said its decision, which followed a six-month study into Japanese-language search technology, was based on a high-level of Internet use in Japan and some similarities between the Chinese and Japanese languages.

It’s true that there are certain similarities between these two languages. According to Wikipedia, Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created on Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years.

However, in the market settings, there are far too many search engines in Japan, perhaps more than 1,000 search engines in different categories. This is due to that Japan is the world’s second most important Internet market after U.S. Some reputable search engines in Japan including Yahoo! Japan, Google Japan, Goo, Infoseek Japan, Lycos Japan, MSN search Japan, Excite Japan, Fresh Eye, Biglobe, and etc.

My view is Japan market is truly competitive. There are several well-established U.S. and Japanese search engines as listed above in Japan. I believed Baidu know pretty well in how to penetrate that particular market. They would use the same type of search strategy that make them success in China and duplicate there in Japan. Moreover, Baidu gained the “second-mover advantage” in Japan search market. They learned the lessons of how a foreign search engines entered into Japan market. Success or not, eventually Baidu is a winner in the sense that they have set up their presence in one of the global important markets.