In South Korea, Google Is Not King

Ever heard of Naver.com? Unless you’re South Korean, the chances are it will mean nothing to you. But it’s by far the most popular search engine in the country, dwarfing the competition, including Google.   Naver.com uses a different model, one that resembles Wikipedia more than the usual search engine. In a country where 70% of the population is online, Naver.com’s volunteer respondents answer queries, often in real time, as well as establishing a proprietary database of information.   It all began in 1999, when the search engine’s parent company, NHN, set up Naver.com. At that time there was very little information online in Korean, forcing them to start virtually from scratch.   “So we began creating Korean-language text,” said NHN spokesman Lee Kyung Ryul. “At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database.”   Whether by accident or design, it paid off. Today, Naver.com dominates the South Korean market, with a staggering 77% of all search queries in the country (by contrast, Google’s South Korean market share is a paltry 1.7%).   The information in Naver’s database isn’t shared with other search engines, and currently it contains around 70 million entries. Although similar to Wikipedia, it doesn’t have any editorial supervision, leaving the quality of some entries dubious.