Women who use Yahoo vs. those who prefer Google — which are sexier? That’s a question posed by one ladies’ magazine, which polled 600 female users of both websites about how they perceived themselves. While Yahoo’s star may have been eclipsed by Google in the U.S. and Europe, the brand is still going strong here in Japan, where less-sophisticated users often associate the Yahoo website with “the Internet” in general, often not knowing there’s anything beyond it. Yahoo just seems to “get” the Japanese market in a way that other companies have trouble emulating, and their market share for search in Japan stands at 51% compared with 39% for Google. The magazine’s poll found that among female Googlers, 23.5 ranked themselves as “sexy” or “somewhat sexy” while just 9.6% of female users of Yahoo described themselves this way. The article went on to postulate that users of Google thought the service was kakko ii or “cool” because of its more technical approach to the web, while Yahoo Japan users thought less deeply about what tools they were using to get information.
Yahoo is still king of search in Japan, especially among females.
