If you’ve been following our coverage of Vietnam’s search engine market, you’ll remember CocCoc. It’s a Russian-funded but Vietnam-based search engine company that pivoted its focus last year to focus on its browser. Although the company arguably has much better location data, as evidenced by its Google Maps competitor app, Nha Nha, it is still unclear how well the search engine has been doing. I think Google has just been too strong a competitor to match on that front.
CocCoc launched its titular browser in April 2013. But that version was only for Windows PCs. I don’t blame them. Vietnam’s market is dominated by PCs and according to CocCoc’s own data, Mac users only make up 0.6 percent of its current search engine traffic. This was probably a wise choice, according to the CEO of CocCoc, Victor Lavrenko, since the browser is now number two in the market, just behind Chrome and ahead of Firefox. Just this week, CocCoc launched its new Mac browser, to target the small but high-end market in Vietnam.
Although numbers are always hard to track, it’s clear that entering the browser market was the right choice for CocCoc. In September, Lavrenko reported that the browser had helped grow CocCoc, the search site, to 5.2 million daily visitors. From the same ComScore report, Google was at 5.7 million daily visitors. If the growth rate continues, CocCoc may be on a path to surpass Google in Vietnam.
From a product perspective, this is not surprising. For Vietnamese users, the CocCoc browser has several killer features that blow Chrome, Firefox, and Safari out of the water. It allows for automatic diacritics (making it easier for Vietnamese people to type), automatically works around the unofficial Vietnamese Facebook block, and makes downloading from sites like YouTube and other local entertainment and media sites easy. The same is true of CocCoc’s search engine, which handles the Vietnamese language better than Google (although it’s debatable how significant that difference is). These small feature tweaks have contributed significantly to CocCoc’s steady success.
Keep in mind that the CocCoc browser (Mac and PC versions) is actually built on top of Chromium, Google’s open source project for its browser Chrome. Therefore, CocCoc is basically leveraging code from Google. Use Google to beat Google. Ironic, indeed.
If all these numbers do end up checking out, it’s quite clear that Google will not take this lying down. The Google team dedicated to Vietnam is the largest one based in Singapore and is known locally to take a hands-on approach to the Vietnamese market.
This post CocCoc, Vietnam’s own breakneck browser, threatens to overcome Google and is now available for Mac appeared first on Tech in Asia.
CocCoc, Vietnam’s own breakneck browser, threatens to overcome Google and is now available for Mac
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