Check search results in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong

Why do search results differ in East Asia?

Search engines adapt results to the searcher's country, language and location. In East Asia the differences are larger than usual, for three reasons:

• Different engines. In South Korea, Naver is the largest portal and builds its page from its own sections (blogs, cafés, news, shopping). In Japan, Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google's search technology but adds its own ads and modules.
• Different languages. Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong each have their own language or script, and Hong Kong searchers use Chinese and English.
• Local results. Map listings, local businesses and ads depend on where the searcher is.

A check from a US or European IP, even with the right language parameter, can miss all three.

How do I run a clean local check?

1. Use a sticky session per check: USERNAME-country-jp-session-q001-ttl-30. The result page and the pages you open from it then come from one IP.
2. Stay signed out and use a fresh browser profile or a new context in Playwright, so your history does not personalise results.
3. Set the language with URL parameters (hl, gl for Google) and the Accept-Language header.
4. Record the context: date, time, query, country code and session ID, next to the screenshot or HTML.
5. Change the session ID for the next query to get another local IP.

The setup guide has code for browsers, curl, Python and Playwright.

Which official tools should I use before a proxy?

For your own site, official tools give exact data without loading search pages:

• Google Search Console reports clicks, impressions and average position by country, for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
• Naver Search Advisor is Naver's tool for site owners: indexing status, sitemaps and search performance on Naver.
• Naver Developers and Kakao Developers offer official search APIs for Naver and Daum sections, with call quotas.

Use a residential IP to see what those tools cannot show: the live page around your result, with ads, modules and competitors, as a local searcher sees it. Google's terms do not allow automated access that ignores the instructions in its robots.txt, so keep proxy checks manual and occasional.

Can I check results for one city?

JapanProxies targets countries and cities: add -city-tokyo or -city-seoul to the username; city availability varies. National rankings are usually the same across a country, but local listings and map results depend on the area the search engine infers from the IP and other signals. For an exact location, also use the location settings of official tools such as the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool in Google Ads, and treat proxy results as the national view.