We are both blessed and cursed in Asia when it comes to computer usage and information access. We are blessed because most of us in this generation are at least bilingual so we can assimilate information not only in English but also in our native languages. We are cursed because the characters of our languages are represented as double byte character set (DBCS) in the computer world. What this means is quite a lack of support by software vendors in the single byte characters set (SBCS) world at least until recent years.

This "issue" gets additionally complicated in search engine marketing. Because the search engines want all their advertisements to be uniformly formatted, they put restrictions on how many characters can go into the ad title and description. For English this is fairly uniformed and the restrictions are usually reasonable, but when it comes to Asian languages and Asian search engines there can be some real odd limitations.

For example, Overture Japan (owned by Yahoo) put a 15 character limitation on the ad titles and 33 character limitation on the description. This is fine and dandy if your ads are entirely written in Japanese but try putting a German brand name into the ads (the German language is known for the length of its characters) and all of a sudden those 15 characters becomes extremely limiting. The problem is, Overture Japan actually treat the single byte character as double byte so while you might think 15 double byte characters = 30 single bytes, in reality your 18 character German brand name will not fit into the title space!

Granted most search users of in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, etc. search and browse in their native languages anyhow, but you can't deny the fact that English brand names (eg: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz) are typically more well recognized (and advertised). As an advertiser, I wouldn't want my potential customer to waste time in translating our ads if a well recognized name can draw their attention immediately.