Google’s Country Experience: France, Germany, Japan 2

Case study 3 Google’s Country Experience: France, Germany, Japan

Yoichi Horibe

I foresee main search engine generation based on important facts related to cultural and foreign matters. Google is the largest search engine in the world today and their profits are mounting. However, they are struggling to expand their business to worldwide because there are some problems that have come about related to cultural differences and internet and technology laws that are imcomplete.

The search engines use of ranking systems enable us to find the most relevant websites easily. This is tremendously profitable for search engines. Web mining is tremendously profitable for search engines.  However, ranking systems should reflect a vision of history and culture. For example, with the surge of digitized textbooks, the French chief librarian said Europe should not only convert its books into digital files, but should also control the page rankings of responses to searches. The ranking is closely related to their country’s culture and reputation.

There are remarkable developments of mining technology. France will try to make “imagine mining” which will enable users to find out results with software that would recognize shapes and colors and then retrieve images and video clips similar to the query image. On the other hand, Germany is developing voice recognition. This technology will find audio files and automatically translate them into a number of European languages. France and Germany need to have their search engines, Quaero and Theseus because US Google has had filed so many suits for infringements of copyright filed against them.

There are some specific problems for each country in Asia.  Japanese electronic technology is remarkable but nowadays, Japanese tend to move away from hardware because the technology is too popular and has diminished in value. Japanese government wants a Japan-centric search engine. Yahoo Japan is very popular. I didn’t know that Yahoo Japan was a foreign based site because it understands Japanese culture. I said Japanese government may want a search engine for Japanese but I think it will be difficult because Yahoo Japan has already fulfilled its citizen’s needs. They need to bring in some killer applications for it. China must have so many domestic controversial issues than Japan and this makes it more difficult to bring in foreign web systems to China. For example, they are prohibited from using Facebook and Twitter. Baidu is their search engine.

              In conclusion, every country has its own circumstances and culture. We need to prevent copyright infringements based on controversial domestic issues or cultural differences.