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Welcome to the Taiwan fight for the most popular site, a fight to the death, or until one of the contenders gives in. In the red corner, we have all time champion Yahoo!, weighing as much as the Internet itself, infrastructure included, that won the last seven match-ups against anyone
bold enough to challenge its supremacy. Turn your attention to the blue corner, where we have Wretch.cc, best known for offering free blogs, picture and video posting. Word on the streets has it that it's a set-up fight, after last year the Yahoo Mammoth swallowed today's opponent in a (supposedly) $22.7 million bite.
Here's the gong, ladies and gentlemen internauts, don't get your hopes high, it'll probably be a short fight, ending with a technical KO. Yahoo! steps into the middle of the ring, to hold its position of reigning site, but what's this? Wretch makes a short sidestep to the right and delivers a blow to the giant's groin. Referee calls fair move! The match is over!
True story. The numbers published by Business Next, a Taiwanese local magazine, show that Wretch has overcome its poor start and continued to grow, year after year, until in 2007 it swiped the first position in the most trafficked sites in the Asian country, right from under Yahoo!'s arse. Luckily for the Sunnyvale-based company's local branch, last year's purchase of Wretch saves it… somehow. The changing of ownership for the new top dog happened after Yahoo! saw that whatever it might do, it would not stop Wretch's ascension, not even adding an English - Chinese dictionary. Count the kanji, if you're not impressed when reading about it.
Google came first in the search engine category, but with its US version, followed in second by Google Taiwan, Chinese Baidu came third and Flurl, a video search engine, ranked fourth. Surprise, surprise, YouTube did not win the honors for the video posting sites, it was topped by local I'm TV.
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