Yahoo ignores India while launching new tool

Posted on 08-07-2009

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If you have a Yahoo.co.in account, you also have a right to feel indignant and downright pissed off. The search engine and online services giant has just launched its latest and highly anticipated tool, Search Pad, for 16 countries; and nope, India doesn’t figure on it. Want to know who beat us? Philippines. Malaysia. Even Argentina!

Search Pad has been available to beta testers since February, and has received rave reviews from most. What it basically does is that when you are searching for a particular item – say, hotels across London for your upcoming visit – you can copy-paste or drag-and-drop information onto a little pop-up box. The whole experience is similar to taking notes on a scratch pad while you conduct any research.

The fact that these notes are clickable links helps a lot when you do revisit your research. The tool is also smart enough to automatically retain some relevant sites that you visit. And since it’s all in the “cloud”, you can access your research from any PC you operate.

What’s more, Search Pad also lets you create documents out of your research that you can save onto your hard disk, or simply share the information via email or social networking sites with your contacts.

It’s an extraordinarily handy tool, and the more you read about it, the more it makes you go: “Wow, how come Google didn’t do this?”

And that’s why it stings so much more that India was completely ignored in the 16-country roll-out of the new service. It’s no wonder, then, that Bing has taken off a chunk of Yahoo’s search pie in India.

According to StatCounter, from May 1 to June 1, Yahoo had 3.2% of the market share, while MSN and Windows Live totalled up to 1.32% – with Google being the leader at 94.71%.

Since Bing’s launch on June 1, Yahoo has dropped to 2.94%, while Bing has grown to 1.86% of the market share. Google, too, has grown to 94.82%.

At last count (in 2007), India had 80 million Internet users, and by all estimates, the number should be closer to 100 million now. Argentina’s entire population is 39.5 million, with only 9.3 million Internet users. Malaysia has 15.87 million Internet users, while the Philippines have a measly 5.3 million Internet users. The sum of Argentina, Malaysia and Philippine’s users is approximately one-third of India’s total Internet users.

To any Yahoo executive reading this: Isn’t it simple arithmetic that you should not be ignoring the world’s largest democracy when rolling out new services?