Despite Google’s impressive search engine, there is another player that surpassed Google in Japan. Now Google Japan became no. 3 in terms of most popular sites among users in Japan, while FC2 is now second and Yahoo! Japan still holding the largest market share. According to FC2’s blog entry (in Japanese), they’re now no. 2 based on the data that compiled from Alexa.

FC2 was launched in 1999 and thereafter, achieved exponentially growth and currently has 400 million users throughout the world. FC2 is well-known as a blog service provider that allowed its users to create blogs with 1G of online storage free of charge. Moreover, the freedom to redesign an individual blog has therefore attracted many bloggers to use FC2 blog engine.