I had blogged about the search market in APAC almost 8 months back, and had an analysis on the disparity between dollar numbers and search volume.

Comscore released another research recently (excerpt here) on the top search properties in Asia Pacific.

The Asia Pacific search market is extremely diverse- what with many non English speaking countries and local language search engines ruling the roost in different countries. Not only this, even usage behavior varies from country to country. On user behavior- take a look at this fab eye tracking study (Not sure of the exact source, but compiled from various Korean websites)

Eyetracking search user behavior in Asia Pacific

So- while Google searchers tend to concentrate on the top left hand of the pages (thus making top rankings very important), MSN and Yahoo search users are more broad and more in depth seekers (or maybe people are conditioned so much about Google ranking processes that they feel only the top results are relevant -remember this is eye tracking not actual clicks)

Naver is quite interesting considering practically the entire page is read, but specifically the top entire section (top 2-3 results) is popular- and then you see a gradual decline.

Hence in this market, Google still coming on tops in this survey is a big win for Google- but in the non English speaking countries, Google is still not the top engine (not in the tables below- throwing some general knowledge there)- and that is where it has to improve its standing.

Excerpt- Top 10 search engines in Asia:

Top search properties in Asia

Google almost a third of the share and Yahoo almost a fifth.

Alibaba classifying as a search site is strange , and even if I understand the logic right,  pray, where is ebay?

Top countries by search volume in Asia:

Top countries by search volume in Asia

China rules in the volume by countries and not surprisingly. In a country where scale achieves different proportions altogether, the volume of searches is no exception. Interestingly, top 3 properties are Chinese- Sohu, Tencent and Baidu. Not counting the Chinese language versions of the international sites and even Alibaba- originating from Hong Kong, China (right?).

What is your reading on this and do you think users search differently in differrent countries or even by different portals?