Japanese government funding home-grown search product

The Japanese government is subsidizing a new search engine effort by 30 Japanese companies including Hitachi, Fujitsu, and NTT. Yahoo! currently dominates the Japanese market through its partnership with Softbank. Yahoo’s search engine was powered by NTT’s goo from 1998 until 2001 but Yahoo has been using its own search technology in Japan since October of last year.

The new Japanese search engine will feature better interactions on TV screens and through multimodal inputs such as voice. The domestic research institute for new search technologies opens this Friday. (via Search Engine Watch)