Web search engine Google launches Japan service

TOKYO (Reuters) -- Google, one of the fastest growing search engines on the Web and Yahoo!'s new default search engine, says it has launched full search services in Japanese.

The Mountain View, California-based company said in a release on Tuesday it has also launched Chinese and Korean search functions, bringing the range of its international services to 15 different languages.

Competition for an efficient search engine in Japan is still in the beginning stages, with Yahoo! Japan acting as the nation's primary portal with nearly 1.4 billion page views a month, according to Nielsen/Netratings.

Google's Japanese service had been available in a beta test mode for a while, and the fully capable version can be accessed through Google's home page. It is not yet incorporated into Yahoo! Japan's Web page, unlike its U.S. counterpart.

"With more than a billion searchable web pages, including almost 75 million in Asian language content, we anticipate this new technology will become widely used throughout the world," chief executive and co-founder Larry Page said in a statement.

Google operates by storing an index of more than a billion web pages. When a user conducts a search, Google returns results that are ranked according to the number of links pointing to other pages.

The company says it handles more than 40 million search queries every day, and that international users make up about half of the Google user community.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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