Baidu Japan has finally relaunched its search engine that mainly focused on the Japanese. If you want to know the progress on how Baidu ventured into the Japan market, you can read the review on my March 2007 post and the most recent one, the January 10’s post. The relaunched Baidu Japan search engine, as shown in the below picture comprised of four (4) main search services, i.e. Web page search, image (photo) search, video search, and lastly, the Japanese blog search. On this landing page of Baidu Japan search engine, these four main services are listed from left to right, with the top three favorite searches highlighted in orange colors. Their desire to attract more Japanese in using this search engine can be viewed by the redesigned of the search engine, and this is a speculative piece, in order to attract Japanese, it’s imperative that one must heavily focused on the design, you can’t just provide a tiny search bar on the search engine’s landing page, and hope that other people will fall in love with the would-be Yahoo! Japan’s competitor (Yahoo! Japan controlled over 60% of the Japan search market).

Apparently, this is a typical example on how competition in Japan market will increase pressure toward rearchitecting a new search engine to meet the needs of the majority Japanese.

Baidu appears to have decided that they’ll never abandon the Japan market with the forthcoming new Japan search engine. Its new Japan search engine will be launched on 23 this month. This revamped search engine will included three main services to the Japanese, i.e. video, travel and gourmet. I believe this revamp is much to do with the response of competitive pressure from the continual growth of Yahoo! in Japan market. Yahoo! Japan still leading the search engine market and any new entrants do not seemed to threaten its leadership position there.

Baidu Japan, first launched in February last year, is very much motivated by the Japan market, its first overseas market other than its home base, i.e. China. Rumors also suggested that Baidu was looking at South Korea and the U.S. market as well, and no surprise that they’ll launch their own Korea and English search engines in the future.

I previously has wrote about the overseas expansion of Baidu in a post that entitled, “Baidu Japan Launched” in February this year. The launched of Baidu’s search engine is comprised of Baidu branding power, deep search engine expertise, a great team with the expansion dream and a commitment of serving the Japan’s users well. Now the search services is available for first-phase testing and they are initially offering web and image search restricted to Japanese market, as shown in the above picture.

The current domain name Baidu registered in Japan is Baidu.jp, a second-tier Japanese domain name. Baidu has problems with the domain, i.e. Baidu.co.jp in Japan market. Now this Baidu.co.jp is owned by a company that called “CBC株式会社” in Japan (below picture). Recent buzz in the market was Baidu has tried ways to get back this particular domain name and claimed that they hold rights on the Baidu name in whatsoever country.

I came across the Baidu Japan search engine just now. I believed Baidu is still building the foundation of their house in Japan. I did posted a post that entitled, “Baidu looks to Japan Market” in December last year, that post I did covered some of my perspective on the Japan market entry aspect. No doubt Japan is an important market for Baidu, and I tend to think that the management of Baidu has spent years of planning just to penetrate this market. If succeed eventually, I wonder Baidu should prepared itself to penetrate the English market as well.

On the Baidu Japan web page, I did not see the familiar interface as it should be. As the picture shown in the above, you’ll notice that Baidu has stated some Japanese words on the site, when I used the Babel Fish to translate it into English, I didn’t quite understand what Baidu trying to say to the Japanese. (Sorry to say that I’m Chinese educated, not good in English and did not learn Japanese language before.) In fact, I believed it is still few months before the Baidu Japan site really going “live” there. But whatever Baidu would like to achieve in Japan, I hope Baidu should carefully vetted to be confirm that it would work well in Japan as Japanese’s culture is very different when compared to the Chinese.

I came across an interesting article that Chinese Internet search leader Baidu.com 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.

My sense is that it’s true that there are certain similarities between these two languages, as 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 company 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.