Making international headlines today is that the story that Japan will soon be developing its own version of a search engine.

A number of prominent Japanese organizations will be working on the project, among them Hitachi, Fujitsu and the University of Tokyo.

From an article appearing in the Mainichi News:

“Currently, three major U.S. Internet companies, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, dominate the search engine market and have kept their search engine technology a secret. Many people in Japan fear that the domination of the three firms will prevent Japanese companies from entering the market.”

But wait! It gets even cooler:

“Users will be able to modify the technology to develop their own search engines to meet their needs, which researchers hope will lead to technological innovations.

The organizations participating in the project are aiming to develop technology which will allow Internet users to search for information on TV screens and show information in response to verbal requests.”

Sadly, the story says nothing about what I’m looking forward to most: an ultra-cute, ultra-cool Japanese-designed logo.

On a related note, this crazy interesting AP article explains why cuteness is such a valuable commodity in The Land of The Rising Sun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 2:10 pm and is filed under International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.