Japanese Top Search Keywords 2009 By Yahoo! Japan

Posted on November 18th, 2009 by Akky Akimoto

Although it is November, the season of 2009 ranking comes! Yahoo! Japan discloses their annual ranking by what keywords people searched in this year.

As always, all Japanese search engines and portals will follow, but Yahoo! Japan is the No.1 search in Japan, this ranking is one of the best to describe “regular” people’s search behaviour, except the keyword “Yahoo”.

PC search
ranking keyword meaning 2008
1 YouTube No.1 movie site 1
2 Mixi No.1 social network 2
3 2 channel No.1 bulletin board 3
4 Google No.2 search 4
5 Rakuten No.1 online mall 5
6 Amazon No.2 online mall 6
7 Niconico Douga No.2 movie site 7
8 Goo NTT’s portal 8
9 JAL No.1 airline 10
10 MSN Microsoft’s portal 13

As you see, most high-ranked keywords just stay the same positions.

Some notable changes
“HelloWork”(government job centre for unemployment) moving up from 20th to 13th may show that more people have bitter time this year.

Boosted web services:

•Kakaku.com(Price comparison service) 12th(from 22nd)
•Amebro(Blog hosting) 14th(-, out of top 50 in 2008)
•Han Game(online game) 15th(21th)
•Cookpad(recipe site) 20th(47th)
•“Zenryaku” for Zenryaku Profile(mobile profile site) 34th(-)
•Google Maps 42nd(-)
•Zozo Town(apparel mall) 46th(-)
•livedoor(portal) 47th(-)

Services Losing positions:

•Wikipedia 26th(19th)
•Gurunabi(restaurant guide) 53rd(35th)
•Rikunabi(job matching) 64th(37th)
None of “Twitter” or “Facebook” appeared on the top 100, yet.

Mobile search
ranking keyword meaning 2008
1 Mixi No.1 PC social network 1
2 2 channel No.1 bulletin board 2
3 Mobage Town No.2 mobile social network 3
4 YouTube No.1 movie site 5
5 Gree No.1 mobile social network -
6 Google No.2 search 7
7 Rakuten No.1 online mall 9
8 Amebro CyberAgent’s blog portal -
9 Amazon No.2 online mall 8
10 McDonald Hamburger Chainstore -

On mobile ranking, 7 of 10 keywords remain from 2008 ranking. 3 bbs sites went away, one of them stopped the service.

As always, erotic words seem to be excluded from the rankings.