Expedia Japan — Number one on both engines

Japan was the market that did not behave like the others. Most Japanese users searched on Yahoo Japan, not Google, and in 2010 Yahoo ran its own index — so winning Google alone would have missed the larger half of the country. The brand also had to be found in three writing systems at once: expedia in roman letters, エクスペディア in katakana, えくすぺでぃあ spelled out phonetically in hiragana. Across twenty tracked brand terms Expedia held number one on Yahoo Japan for every single one, and on Google Japan for seventeen of the twenty. The harder half was the generic travel terms, where Expedia was competing with Japan's own booking giants rather than for its own name. There it took 海外ホテル — "overseas hotels" — to number one on Yahoo and number two on Google, along with the same first-or-second placings on overseas hotel booking, and page-one positions on both engines for New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Paris, Rome and London hotels. Seventeen generic travel terms on page one of Yahoo Japan, eleven on Google.