Traffic from Korean Search Engines - 2008

Provider Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Naver 71.48% 71.70% 71.62% 71.22% 70.45% 69.09% Daum 12.20% 12.07% 12.11% 11.98% 12.45% 14.54% Y! K 5.58% 5.46% 5.24% 5.34% 5.15% 4.90% Google K 1.66% 1.65% 1.93% 1.81% 1.91% 1.90% Empas 1.41% 1.37% 1.39% 1.37% 1.27% 1.20% Nate 1.20% 1.18% 1.24% 1.26% 1.24% 1.11%

Korean Search Engines

South Korean search portal Naver, the undisputed King of Internet search in the country, handles more than 70% of all web searches originating in South Korea. They have all kinds of search categories such as web, news, images, videos, blogs, books, local search, and so on. The best thing, among their search services, is a knowledge service like Yahoo answers. Because of this knowledge service with a walled-garden policy, Naver has steadily increased their Internet search traffic and finally they have become a top search portal in South Korea.

Daum, another South Korean search portal, comes in second with a 12 percent share. Before the appearance of Naver, Daum was a leader of portal with a free e-mail service in South Korea. They have lots of search services like Naver, but currently they are focusing on the UCC service specializing in movies to increase traffic. DaumĄŻs UCC service specialized in a movie called TV Pot.

Once, Yahoo! was not only the best search engine but also a pioneer of search portals in South Korea. But Yahoo!, the world wide search engine, currently has only a 6 percent share in the country because they could not stand the attack of Daum, Naver and Empas which will be introduced in the next paragraph. According to their latest report, they already index 6 millions of blog data which is the top in South Korea and they will crawl more data to focus on blog search. And they also stated that the new search algorithm will be introduced to add more weight to more popular articles.

Google, does it need more explanation? Just skip the general explanation, let me tell you my point of view about Google in South Korea. I think they failed thoroughly to adapt to the South Korean search market at least until now. Because of South KoreaĄŻs few web pages and the competitors with walled-garden policies on their DB, Google could not focus on such few data and therefore they could not attract general users who are seeking something to read and see the small results. Their market share of less than 2 percent shows GoogleĄŻs present position in South Korea. The landing page of Google Korea is a little bit different than others. It has some UI such as Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Picasa with colored circles.

Empas was South KoreaĄŻs first search engine starting with a natural language processing technique. Recently, Empas was acquired by SK Communications which has South KoreaĄŻs top social networking service and a portal Nate.com. But their market share has stayed under 2 percent.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Nate is owned by SK Communications. They also show features as a typical web portal and have under the 2 percent share.