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Comment by eric_khun | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Japan since 2 months now, and I see most of the people using in the metro/street using Yahoo than Google. Is Yahoo doing a better search in Japanese than Google? Or are they just better in marketing?

Also, seeing lot of people (also many over 30!) browsing Twitter. What surprised me, I rarely saw it in other countries I've been.

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Yahoo Japan is a different beast from the rest of Yahoo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Japan

Oh wow. I really liked "old yahoo". This is a great thing.

And they have a bunch of useful local services and since ebay does not exist in Japanese the next big thing in Japan is Yahoo auctions which is pretty, pretty big.

Huh. Didn't realize that after the Verizon acquisition, it lost all ownership ties with Yahoo. So future readers don't have to click through:

Yahoo Japan was always a separate company, a joint venture between Yahoo and SoftBank. When Verizon acquired Yahoo, the bits that Verizon didn't want - including Yahoo's share of Yahoo Japan - were spun off into a holding company, Altaba. And so now SoftBank and Altaba between them own most of Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo Japan was a JV between softbank and yahoo a long time ago. They kept the branding but they are largely not the same company. Yahoo Japan is actually itself a conglomerate made up of everything from data center to being a cheaper telco in addition to being a portal.

As others have said, Yahoo Japan is a separate company (that shared technology with Yahoo US).

They also moved to Google search results after Yahoo gave up and started using Bing results around 2010, which probably helped them maintain market share (since the Yahoo search transition to Bing was a clusterfuck).

Japanese doesn't use spaces between words, and at least c:a 2008 Google didn't do a great job of separating out search terms.

Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are Japanese too, off the top of my head friends.nico seems large.

Niconico video is big but Google has made youtube a lot bigger in japan compared to a few years ago by doing massive PR campaigns in TV and traditional media.

Nico is like if yahoo had been a success, right? I know they have a .nico tld

I feel like it's a shame these national level internet companies die off when the big US corps move in

Twitter is a more useful in Japan because they can express a lot more in 140 characters than people who use variants of the Latin/Cyrillic alphabet. You can actually communicate entire thoughts, rather than half-baked hot takes.

That's why we have 280 chars now in other countries except for Japan, Korea and China, which stick to the 140 chars.

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