Yahoo! continues to prove popular in Japan, retaining its position as the country's top-ranked web property in August, according to new research.Figures released by comScore suggest that the search engine had more than 41 million visitors to its sites during the month, almost the same number as it had in July.
Rival company Google also enjoyed success, ranking second most popular with its sites attracting 30.8 million visitors, while Microsoft was third, with 29.7 million.
Managing director of comScore Japan Maru Sato commented: "Since our first official ranking in June, we have seen Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft sites remain unchanged as the top three properties in Japan."
Among the top ten properties in the country, only Wikipedia sites experienced significant growth during the month, attracting 19,586 million visitors, an increase of three per cent over July.
According to Mr Sato, "August ... tends to be a less active month online due to summer holidays".
Other properties included in the top ten were Rakuten, an internet service company based in Japan, which received 28,730 million visitors and Amazon, which received 17,906 million.
The research also revealed that, during August, nearly 54 million people in Japan aged 15 and over went on the internet either while at home or at work, averaging 19 hours online during the month.
Last month, comScore revealed that Google and Microsoft were the most popular sites in Germany over July, securing 23.8 million and 18.1 million visitors respectively.
