If you believe the international business press, you could be forgiven for thinking that there’s only one search engine game in town - Google. Internet portals such as Yahoo! and MSN are billed as mere also-rans.

Looked at from an Asian perspective, things look different. For while Google has solidified its lead in most English-language markets (in India it has a 70% share of the search market, and it tops traffic rankings in Australia and Singapore), in others it has its work cut out.

Yahoo! is used by almost 80% of Japanese internet users every month, with 65% using its search engine, and also leads in Hong Kong. China’s Baidu accounts for 60%+ of search marketing expenditure while in South Korea Naver attracts some 70% of search dollars.

Like Yahoo!, Baidu and Naver offer a host of community activities in addition to web search, including blogging and discussion boards. Naver’s killer app is its Knowledge iN search engine (think Yahoo! Answers); with over 60m questions submitted, it has help fill a glaring hole on the Korean internet - a dearth of local language content. Naver now has over 26m registered users, and over 50%+ of South Koreans have set Naver.com as their default homepage.

In China, MP3 search accounts for over 20% of Baidu’s traffic. Other popular services include Baidu Zhidao, its social search tool, and Baidu Baike, a local language wiki encyclopedia, which now boasts nearly 750,000 entries. Baidu’s success comes despite Google’s Chinese language search capability being considered the superior and Adwords the more effective marketing system.

The lesson? That technology by itself won’t deliver the users (and the consequent marketing money) and that it pays to understand the needs of local users, for whom communication and networking are key activities online.

In east Asia, a search offering with a significant community component works best. The portal is alive and kicking.