Google Losing Default Mobile Search Engine Position On Docomo i-mode Portal, A Gate To Half Of Japanese Mobile Web
Japan’s largest cellphone carrier NTT Docomo, which boasts 50% market share on cellphone users, also keeps over 50% share of cellphone web connection services i-mode, announced that they switch their default mobile internet search service from Google mobile search to Goo’s one since April 30th [J].
Until last week, your searching on i-mode portal, iMenu (you can not access without Docomo cellphone mobile browser), gave you three sections of search results.
- iMenu Site Kensaku (i-mode official sites search), provided by NTT Resonant(Goo)
- Sonota Keitai Site Kensaku (all mobile sites search on the Internet) by Google
- PC internet search by Google
The first category is the golden goose both for Docomo and third party mobile contents providers for official i-mode sites (so called “Koushiki Site”).
The latter two have been provided by Google since April 1st 2008 (Docomo’s release [J])
This time, Docomo is trying to change the second category’s search provider from Google to Goo. Goo mobile search has been one of many non-default mobile search on i-mode. User can set to merge the first category and the second category together, both official and unofficial mobile sites result in mixed by settings, too.
Too much search traffic than expected?
However, on the very same night around 11:40 p.m., NTT Docomo and NTT Resonant stops this change, and reverted its mobile internet search back to the original (i.e. Google mobile search). Docomo submitted apology release [J], and it has not been updated yet on May 3rd.
So those NTT group alliance’s attempt to lighten Google’s presence on i-mode started with failure, which is a shame. But the release says that they are working on it to go ahead.
See Also:
Some screenshots with new Goo mobile search on i-mode default, taken on April 30th at mbdb.jp [J]
Author Information @akky(Akky AKIMOTO) is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. Apart from that, he writes for Asiajin and personal blog [J]. 
[...] Asiajin » Google Losing Default Mobile Search Engine Position On Docomo i-mode Portal, A Gate To Ha… – if you have enough eyeballs and offer a good enough product even Google is vulnerable [...]
[...] Google Losing Default Mobile Search Engine Position On Docomo i-mode Portal, A Gate To Half Of Japan…: Google is once again being snubbed and where do they go from here after NTT-Docomo, the largest telco dissed them for another mobile search engine. However, it did not help with Goo crashing on the first day when they realized that they could not handle the load. [...]
[...] I reported on Monday, NTT comrades – #1 cellphone carrier NTT Docomo and Japanese portal Goo owner NTT [...]
[...] 根據日本科技部落格Asiajin的報導，日本最大的電信業者 NTT Docomo在4/30日將其手機裡iMode選單裡，原本預設為Google搜尋引擎，改為以Goo這個同為NTT集團所擁有網路搜尋引擎，也是日本自製國產，且歷史悠久的網站；NTT Docomo不僅占有日本手機使用者數的5成以上，其提供的手機上網服務iMode也順勢占有5成以上的市場份額。 [...]