Can Google Be Beat? They Already Have Been in South Korea...
The International Herald Tribune had a good article recently
about the search
market in South Korea. It points out that local search company Naver.com has more than 77 percent of all Web searches
originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick.
This is largely due to user-generated content - specifically Naver's "Knowledge iN"
real-time question-and-answer platform, which gets "an average of 44,000 questions a
day". Second in the South Korean search market is another local product, Daum.net, with
10.8 percent share, followed by Yahoo's Korean-language service with 4.4 percent. Google
has only 1.7 percent of Korean Web searches.
The IHT has more info on Naver Knowledge iN:
"Naver has so far accumulated a user-generated database of 70 million entries. Typical queries include why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb, which digital music player is best, why people have hair whorls and what a high-school boy should do when he has a crush on a female teacher.
Lacking the full-time editorial oversight found on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, some Naver entries are of dubious veracity and attract vigorous rebuttals. But many respondents, keen to build and maintain an online reputation, do careful research to provide useful answers."
Interestingly, this has some similarities with the approach of Viewpoints, the online reviews company profiled yesterday by our own Phil Butler. But what also struck me about Naver's approach is that it is essentially what Yahoo is attempting to do, with its heavily-promoted Answers product. If you look at just about any Yahoo content site, you'll see an Answers section displayed prominently.
Of course, the Q&A format hasn't escaped Google's attention either (nothing gets past Google). The Mountain View company is experimenting with Google Answers in Russia. Also, as SearchEngineLand noted, Google has tried making its UI more attractive in Korea in order to get more market share. If this kind of experimentation (Q&A, UI innovation) sounds familiar, it's because it is precisely what our network blog AltSearchEngines talks about every day :-)
Pic c/o SEL
Of course Q&A won't be the answer for every market - Google is very entrenched as the number 1 search engine in the US and most other english language markets. But the South Korea example does show the benefits of a) localizing your product, and b) actively using and promoting 'next generation' search methods. Also don't forget that as mobile phones begin to be used more in the US and similar markets, user-generated content and personalization will be used more by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and other companies.
I do think this is Yahoo's best chance of making ground on Google, because they are strong in both user-generated content and mobile. Although as yet Yahoo Answers is nowhere near as compelling a product as Naver is in Korea.
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I was reading Web 2.0 Asia and they also published an article on how Naver is does it better than Google.
Posted by: Angus Lau | July 12, 2007 7:53 PM
Better or best? It's interesting that this search business seems to be the point of proving whether something is more competitive than Google.
Because I don't think that this is where Korean media businesses want to compete with Google. I talked to the CEO of CyWorld in Korea, which is a social portal, and he said that the main sticking point about google was its monumental importance as a global advertising and media platform.
Search is the least of the worries. Korea has a very similar situation as Japan, in that terrestrial TV is locked into lucrative deals with local advertising companies, meaning a lot of the money for programming and innovation goes to very large traditional type of media.
Okay, so Naver has been able to "strip search" Google, by stripping away searchers, but what about advertising? What about sponsored links? What about video and image hosting and now the office applications field?
I think that search is no longer the go-to player in terms of strategizing market share acquisition. The field has multiplied to a global size and the terms in the field have multiplied dozenfold.
Posted by: doug | July 12, 2007 8:31 PM
Doug, Naver already occupied same market share in search advertisement via Overture in Korea. The Google's AdWords is minor player yet although Google contracted with Daum for adwords sales. In case of Video, there are Pandora, Mncast, Daum and Naver and in an image hosting, Cyworld.
There are no foreign competitors in all around web 2.0 market in Korea. Because the Korean's unique internet culture has been over web 2.0 concept by rapid broadband penetration and global web 2.0 platform didn't cover local needs.
Posted by: Channy | July 12, 2007 10:22 PM
Excellent point, Channy.
Well taken.
Posted by: doug | July 13, 2007 12:04 AM
Guruji.com is well poised for such, in India.
Posted by: Vinod | July 13, 2007 1:34 AM
Similar situation is in the Czech Republic were local search engine - http://www.seznam.cz has about 70% of market share and google is having hard time getting better.
Posted by: Janusz | July 13, 2007 1:50 AM
In the Czech Republic the dominant portal is www.seznam.cz with 63 % share of search (Google 25 %) and even bigger shares of its webmail, news, maps etc.
Posted by: jilm | July 13, 2007 1:50 AM
let's be honest, it's the same situation in many countries! many in Asia or in east Europe, and the reason is simple, Google lost its market share by a lack of localisation...
The same with Microsoft in South Korea for example, with their MSN...
The future will be localised or it won't be worldwide...
Posted by: Thierry BEZIER | July 13, 2007 3:54 AM
My understanding is that one way Google lost out is that there just wasn't much Korean language content to index, and Google does indexing, not content creation. Naver on the other hand searches what's out there, but also offers the platform to create new content, which you can then search for via Naver. A self-perpetuating system.
This may explain why Google has not been so competitive there, but it's unclear if Naver's style would be competitive in the U.S., where so much content is created outside the realm of the search sites' related services (such as Answers).
Posted by: Adam Jusko | July 13, 2007 5:23 AM
I wonder if Korea and possibly Japan are unique situations. I have family from Korea and they all seem to have extreme nationalistic tendencies when it comes to trying to support "home-grown" companies. In this specific instance, I'm wondering if Naver will be able to be anything more than a Korea-only occurrence of beating Google.
The reason why I wonder if Korea (more so than Japan) is unique is that Koreans seem to have different "tastes" when it comes to technology (anecdotally that is). For example, I noticed that Apple and its simplified products and user interfaces doesn't do very well in Korea. Actually, Apple products are considered "too simple". When you look at products that do well there, you see smaller and smaller products built by Samsung or LG jam packed with features (e.g., phones or MP3 players).
Combine that with the lack of localization (thanks Channy), and I wonder if that's why Google hasn't been able to become dominant in Korea. Google, and other foreign competitors, may not have a good understanding of the local tastes/preferences of Korea. Alvin Toffler predicted that the future of technology will be "mass customization" and I don't see why the Internet would be any different. Google, while a great set of services, may not be able to meet local needs fast enough. Might be an opportunity for companies in India or China to emerge.
That's just my 2 cents worth.
Posted by: Hans | July 13, 2007 6:06 AM
Korea is pretty unique. I have done some business there. Language (more importantly, the character set) is an issue. Pride in being Korean, suspicion of foreign invaders. Way more wireless/broadband than US. So I am not sure general conclusions can be drawn. But the idea of aggregating the best answers - within a niche - makes a lot of sense to me.
Posted by: bernard lunn | July 13, 2007 7:38 AM
I think it's as much a matter of timing as anything.
Google's got a great set of services. But none of them are honestly that much stronger than its top competitors either. Search is still their biggest hook and differentiator.
The problem Google sometimes runs into on the international front is that established local competitors have had time to catch up on the search front before Google could gain the same type of momentum they have in most English-speaking countries. Google was able to hit it big here at the start of the century because the quality of its search results was light years ahead of the competition. Google is now synonymous with search here even though its results are no longer notably different than its closest competitors which have since caught up. But that same timing that allowed it to flourish here may now work against it. Most major portals have quality search these days. Google's main advantage is minimized so they'll have to work that much harder to gain headway in certain areas.
Posted by: RustyS | July 13, 2007 7:53 AM
Google simply came in too late. They had didn't have a true localized product for years in Korea. Now it seems they are trying, but it's a bit late. This has happened in other markets, but to be fair they can't devote significant resources to every market.
They do have enough money to play catch up, so they will and might succeed in some markets and fail in others. They are the next Microsoft. Evil and all.
Posted by: Sangjin Chung | July 13, 2007 8:47 AM
In many countries google came too late, even google.** national domains were already registered and used by private people...
Posted by: Kolin | July 13, 2007 10:35 AM
The people in S.K. are very nationalistic bordering on xenophobic/racist at times. Local companies will always dominate there simply because they are korean.
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Posted by: gladys | July 18, 2007 7:53 AM
As posted before in Czech www.seznam.cz is the leading company in search, but I don't think it is due to lack of localization, goole for example is translated to czech.. By my opinion it is because there are still lot of computer-analphabeths and they simply don't know about Google.. I've heard many times from some of my friends that internet equals Seznam.. Also they probably need little bit more than just result, they want local news, weather news, etc..
Posted by: Ondrej | July 24, 2007 5:19 AM
Google is not late in the market. Google came after Yahoo and Microsoft, how do we explain that?
Posted by: Rich Webly | July 31, 2007 4:14 PM
Adam Jusko mentioned that there aren't enough Korean contents indexed by Google. It actually is true, but probably not in the way he thought. There are TONS of Korean content out there. And a good portion of it IS indexed by Google.
But a lot of the information people want to look for is tied up in Naver or Daum, whose robots.txt files used to block out all external bots from indexing ANY of their information. Meaning information in Naver or Daum - even user blogs and other stuff people wants released in public - would be invisible to GoogleBot.
This practice of blocking out bots have only been recently dropped after MUCH heated criticism by the technologically aware - perhaps for about a year now. So up until 2006, Naver had a neat little system going where they would collect information from outside while locking their own data in a safe. You would have to make one crappy service in order NOT to have a near monopoly going with that system. Run site:naver.com on Google - To this day, you only get less than 2 million entries and about half of it's dead URLs from Naver's now discontinued homepage hosting service called Myhome.
Also, your general internet user in Korea wants stuff handed to them. Naver has been very keen to fulfill this need (or rather, encourage this behavior). Whereas Google requires its users to sift through the content themselves and determine whether the information is useful or not. Naver does much of this information sifting for the user - at least for a lot of your simple, basic stuff. For example, if I were to look for some celebrity's name or tv-show title, it will give me neat, edited content complete with pictures and colored fonts. Korean people are used to this system and indeed, an average Korean's biggest reason for not using Google is because "it's not pretty like Naver". For the same reason, the aforementioned Knowledge IN is also immensely popular, where people can simply ask questions without having to look stuff up themselves.
My personal opinion on Naver is that it is the crappiest system EVER for people who wants to find relevant information.
The original article claims that in Knowledge IN, "many respondents, keen to build and maintain an online reputation, do careful research to provide useful answers." This is utter nonsense. For every one person like this, there are at LEAST 20 who doesn't give a whit about their reputation. The answers are usually whatever's on the first two pages of a Naver search - and this is from people who care. Others just regurgitate stuff they "think they heard somewhere at some time". Sometimes, they just outright make up ludicrous false information just to trick the questioner. Questioners themselves are not so much better and not only do they ask stupid questions that can just as easily be searched for, they ask them again and again. There's no accumulation of information there. It's like having 2000 copies of volume "A" of an encyclopedia.
Also, I said Naver sifts information for its user. That's all very fine and dandy, except they get to call the shots as to what shows up where. On the very top of any given Naver search result will invariably be "sponsor links" that spans for more than 1/2 of the first page you see. Sometimes you have to scroll past an entire page before getting past the ads.
On top of that, this sifting is NOT automated. They actually HIRE people to do this instead of developing clever algorithms as Google has done. So there's no way Naver will succeed in any country outside Korea. They can only do what they do because they have enough money to hire people to do a machine's job. They only have enough money because they have a near monopoly going and have plenty of companies who are willing to pay money for better exposure.
Just so you have some perspective here...
Posted by: NightFox | August 1, 2007 8:35 PM