There are a lot of factoids in that article that sound impressive, but all the junk obscures the simple reason Yahoo Japan is such a massive success. The Japan

There are a lot of factoids in that article that sound impressive, but all the junk obscures the simple reason Yahoo Japan is such a massive success. The Japanese internet is very small, compared to the english language internet, so when Google stepped in with just pagerank and no human-powered indexes, Yahoo's colloquial indexing was able to provide a better experience. Even today, any time I search in Japanese, google seems to provide much less useful results.