Shortly after we reported Google’s Zeitgeist keyword rankings of 2013 in last month’s Asia News, Yahoo!Japan followed with its own yearly keyword rankings.As with every year, these rankings, and the comparison of the rankings between the two biggest search engines, offer a great insight into the different usage of the two search engines and the popularity of certain websites and topics among Japanese people.

Here were the top 10 search terms in 2013 on Yahoo!Japan with the Google rankings next to it as a reference:

The biggest movements evident from last year’s overall rankings on Yahoo!Japan are for the sixth and eighth positions.

The only completely new keyword in the top 10 is “Google Map”, and after two consecutive drops in the last two years, Mixi eventually dropped out of the top 10. For more details on Mixi’s current status in Japan, see the SBA article “Mixi struggling in Japan- acquisition through istyle announced.”

When comparing the top 10 results between the two search engines, it seems that Japanese users utilize Yahoo frequently for consuming entertaining content but use Google for more information- directed searches.