Yesterday Yahoo Taiwan upgraded its sponsored results engine from their older version of paid search ads to the new Yahoo Search Marketing Panama interface.

Similar to Japan, Yahoo enjoys a dominance of the Taiwan Search Market Share, with 87.30% of Taiwan users visiting Yahoo Kimo (Yahoo Taiwan) in 2006. 42.89% of Taiwanese users visited Google.

Sponsored search in Taiwan however, is a bit behind the United States and Korea.

“Since 2005, sponsored searches in the United States and Korea have been steadily increasing,” Hung Hsiao-ling, general manager of Yahoo Taiwan told the Press. “In 2007, sponsored searches constituted 43 percent of all searches in the U.S., and 62 percent in Korea.”

In the smaller Taiwan market, however, paid searches amounted to 36 percent in 2007 from 27 percent in 2006, says Yahoo Taiwan. Yahoo Taiwan expects smaller businesses to embrace search marketing with the new Yahoo Search Marketing platform.

[Source : Taiwan Based China Post]