On September 30th 2008, Tinhvan Media, a company of Tinhvan Group officially launched its search service dubbed Xalo (meaning Highway). After more than six months of testing, users now can search Vietnamese with seven main search features: Web, Image, News, Blog, Forum, Music and Classified. This VC backed search service plans to surpass other Vietnamese search services with target of more than 30% of search market in 2010. This number could translate into a big competitor to the incumbent Google search and leave Yahoo in the dust. It sounds like a mission impossible but they hope a peer of Baidu, Naver, Yandex for Vietnam . A pay per click system similar to Google AdWords should be in action late this year. Congratulations to Xalo! We hope search advertising would be a dispensable tool for local marketers.

Technorati Tags: Baidu, Google, Naver, Xalo, Yandex

According to comScore’s release, Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in July with 63 percent of the searches conducted, up from 61.9 percent in July, followed by Yahoo! Sites (19.6 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (4.8 percent), and AOL LLC (4.3 percent).

Americans conducted 11.7 billion searches at the core search engines, nearly identical to the number of core searches conducted in July. Google Sites handled 7.4 billion core searches (up 2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.3 billion and Microsoft Sites with 977 million.

Technorati Tags: AOL, comScore, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Some months ago local media bombarded article stating that Vietnamese people were most interested in Sex based on Google Trends. However we just tried the Google Insights for Search with some keywords relating to Sex and found out some interesting figures:

For Sex keyword: Vietnam is the second after Pakistan in volume of search, but plus Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India made South Asia on top, North Africa is the second group.

Update: 21st September down to 4th position

For Porn: no clear winner but Bangladesh is till the runner-up

With Nude keyword: all top five positions went to South Asian countries with Pakistan and Bangladesh shared the top.

Tried a combination of video + sex: Cambodia took the crown, but Bangladesh is the second again plus two other South Asian (India, Sri Lanka)

From these results we can say that Vietnamese people are far behind South Asian people in searching Sex related keywords. Bangladesh is truly the top country that its people most interested in sex matters using search service from Google. Maybe Vietnamese Internet users are not as sophisticated as South Asians in using keywords.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Trends, Insights, sex, Trends, Vietnam

According to Nielsen Online, Google still keeps moving ahead other search services in the US with 60% share in July 2008. While Yahoo gained nearly a point from 16.6% last June to 17.4% in July, MSN/Windows Live Search lost more than 2% from 14.1% of searches to 11.9%.
There is no data for Vietnam market yet.

Technorati Tags: Google, MSN, Yahoo