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google not popular in Korea and Russia

2007-10-29 10:54:19

As a Korean (Score:5, Interesting)

by ihavnoid (749312) on Monday October 29, @04:09AM (#21154807)

The most would-be-shocking fact is that more than half of the non-technical

people doesn't even know what google is (for example, my mom). In contrast, I

find most of my non-technical friends have naver.com as their first page on IE.

In Korea, it's quite common to see TV commercials say "search XYZ in Naver",

instead of displaying its URL.

The biggest reason is because Naver actually hosts content, rather than just

indexing content. Not only that Naver is a strong search engine company, it

hosts a vast amount of blogs, forums, an online game site (Hangame),

user-provided knowledge base, plus third-party licensed contents (such as

dictionaries, public transportation routes, news contents provided by other

medias, etc.). All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt),

which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's

search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.

Plus, running a homepage *that looks cool* is a very complicated job for a non

tech-savvy person. Thus, they don't get webhosting - they upload contents to

big portals. I've even seen many small businesses forget about homepages, and

instead have a blog/user-created forum/whatsoever on every major player. It

would be much easier for normal users to reach them (since memorizing a URL

written in a non-native language would be painful), and cheaper (near zero) to

maintain.

Another downside of Google is that it DISPLAYS English search results, which

would be useless to them. Yes, people are lazy enough to select the 'Search for

Korean contents only'.

In terms of actual users, I believe Google would fall even further behind (far

behind 10th place), since there is another big portal cyworld (http://

cyworld.com/), which provides personal blogging services and web-based

communities.

I use many different searching methods

- Naver or Yahoo for local information (public transport route, looking for a

place for a nice dinner, etc.)

- Wikipedia for something that's expected to exist on an encyclopedia

- danawa.com and enuri.com for searching best deals (equivalent to PriceGrabber

or whatsoever)

- Naver for anything else in Korean

- Google for everything else, or if all methods above doesn't give a good

enough result.

As a result, I get to use google less and wikipedia more, while naver and

everything else remains somewhat constant.