Dave Naffziger's Blog

I continue to think about the fact that Google is in the Czech market before Yahoo. I wonder how many other countries this is true for?

Fundamentally, I believe this is due to the fact that search is core for Google, but it isn’t core for Yahoo – content is. Related to the “peanut butter” problem, the barriers for localizing all of Yahoo’s content are tremendous, but it is far easier for Google to make its core search and adwords available in a new language. Just imagine trying to transalate http://www.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com. You’ll quickly be able to see how much harder Yahoo’s job is.

Google began licensing IP geolocation technology over 6 years ago. The most visible use of this technology is the country level redirects they do (visitors to Google.com from the Czech Republic are automatically redirected to google.cz). However, the technology enables a number of other critical components of Google’s business:

• Search anywhere. Not only can you send users to a localized version, but you can figure out where servers are hosted, helping to match users with content relevant to them and their country.
• Adwords anywhere. You can buy keywords in any country (and in most major cities). Since Google is easily able to customize search for any country they can also sell adds in any country (payment options obviously being one of the most major hurdles)
• Adsense anywhere. Because Google can distinguish the country of visitors (and has ad inventory), Google can accept publishers that receive traffic from anywhere. Seriously, how absurd is it that YPN is only accepting publishers that receive US traffic?

Panama is Yahoo’s first step towards utilizing IP geolocation technologies, but this is all in the Overture division. I suspect that Yahoo is far from integrating these technologies into its search core. Yahoo had better get moving – 6 years is a lot of time to make up.