We see increasing amounts of search engines popping up on the internet, they are using advanced algorithms to come up with better results. Not in Korea, at least not at Naver. Employees analyze, index and produces content for their search engine by hand. Even though this labor intensity, they count for 70% of the search queries in their country, leaving Google far behind. Naver, founded in 1999, owned by the NHN corporation, counted for $993 million revenue in 2007.

Some say that Naver is lucky because they reside in a homogeneous market, because everybody wants to see the same, they can provide better specialized results. And the ch results are better. Naver focuses on hot topics, using the searched keywords.

Example, if we look at a hot topic, for example if we look for ‘rain’ (a popular singer and actor in South Korea), we find a customized result covering movies, upcoming gigs, pictures and news. This while Google only shows best results and pictures.

Is this the future? Maybe, we see simular incentives for Google and Ask.com being released. Google implements more and more automated plug ins, such as maps and images in their result pages, ask.com sometimes applies custom pages, an example is the custom page for podcast Diggnation.

It all reminds me of the example of Sony, the transnational company was a global player, but was losing profit because of local players. They introduced ‘Glocalization’, an incentive for a global company to act local. Tell me, is this the way to go?

I hope you like that post!

Tags: Korea