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In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google
babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.
Perhaps in the West, we often assume that Google is the only player in town worth using.
It would be interesting to get the view of someone in South Korea, for instance, as to how useful Google is to them when compared with local/regional alternatives?
It's more than likely that Google is far too orientated around the West, both culturally and in terms of results.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
How does Google handle all the various extended character sets out there? Can you search in Cyrillic, Chinese or even French?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
It is surprising thus: People (From the English speaking world) have assumed that Google is number 1. Going by its search results, it is definitely a top contender to the post.So much so that it is the common homepage for millions of internet users all over the world. The non English speaking market is generally assumed to be underdeveloped (Africa, Indian subcontinent) or Google already has something for them(Language packs). The relationship between Google and China is well known, so it is expected to dominate the Chinese and along with it, other SE Asian markets, as it did in the English speaking world. The story comes as a surprise for those who have been seeing the world in a hazy, interpolated and homogeneous manner.(I belong here too.) But after the story is published , the haziness has been removed and the story seems pretty obvious. Hence my reaction: "WTF? IS this even newsworthy?"
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
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.
I am student from Korea so i know very well about Korean websites. Naver gained popularity by providing human generated search engine and user generated contents such as imitation of yahoo's answer page. But there are no good search engine that supports Korean in the face of this planet. At least european laguages share common alphabet, that is the reason why google holds significant share on europe. But Korean is just different from English. As i search internet in Korean, neither google,naver returns reliable results. There are no search engine that supports basic functions like spell correction neither. (Lets say you type Koreea in google and it will suggest you that if you meant to type Korea) web portals and search engines in Korea are more like very well organized catalog with useful advertisements. There are long way to go in developing web search engine in Korean. In fact there are some progress done. Until the new technology is finally embedded into their websites it is just going to be good yellowbook with lots of ads. Funny thing is that when i use google i do my best to ignore all the ads. But when i use Naver, i only look at their ads. funnier things is tho, most scholars use google in Korea when searching Korean, because it has simpler interface.
What the fuck? The non English speaking market is assumed to be underdeveloped? I seriously hope I'm misunderstanding that quote. I mean, countries like France, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, South Korea, Japan, all underdeveloped? Are you telling me that Americans, Brits, Irish, Australians, Canadians etc look down on the rest of the world because they don't speak English as a first language?
> How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special.
I think Google is special. They were the first decent webmail service (ie they offered more than 10 megs or whatever, no annoying ads, POP3 access etc). They offer free mobile phone apps to read Gmail, or use Google maps. The language translation works. Google groups is great - ok, it's a bit buggy and you can't employ killfiles, but there's no other way that I know of to search Usenet archives, and it's pretty quick at that.
That's what I use - I'm sure other people use other features that I've not noticed/used. For all Microsoft's braying about innovation, they just do podgy, uncool stuff, or buy up other people's stuff and then fuck it up. Yahoo are playing catch-up in the search/email area (are they still attaching World Cup 2006 sigfiles to outgoing emails? How amusing!).
Google beats the hell out of Yandex and Rambler where results relevance is concerned. It's just that people got used to these and don't bother to switch.
This is happening already..
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/msn-ignoring-robotstxt-files/
There are ways to block search engines that do this..
http://www.ars.net/bots/
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
I've had interesting problems at some Internet rooms (PC Bangs) here in Korea. Every now and then you'll see odd websites blocked by some strange sort of filtering system. The one I used to go to had Fark.com blocked, Youtube blocked, ESPN was blocked, and even Google.com was blocked. Now, google.co.kr was not blocked, and when I wanted to check my analytics page, google.com/analytics was blocked, but another google analytics page accessed by https:/// (not http:/// was available. I'm not very bright when it comes to networks (or Korean, for that matter), so I'm not sure whose fault it was, but the webpage that came up instead had a graphic that made it clear this was to protect children.
This is NOT a widespread epidemic, but it has occurred occasionally at various internet rooms around the country under different ownership (ie: not a chain). As someone else mentioned, Naver has brand strength (company commercials approach it very similarly to the way AOL used keywords), but these sorts of filtering anomalies don't hurt.
If Google were to ignore the robots.txt file it is possible to bring suit against Google in the United States. There have been some successful such suits based upon the old english common law cause of action "trespass to chattels" which was a relic of common law history until the internet came along. I believe one such successful action was by eBay against a auction crawler (eBay v. Bidder's Edge or something like that). Some courts I believe are unwilling to hear such a claim unless there is actual monetary damage caused by the indexing, so not sure how this would turn out (or if I am remembering the caselaw very well). I am not a lawyer.
The "useless" google is your friend:
http://www.ipmce.su/~lib/osn_prav.html
I used to have a "legit" version at my old house (no access to it at the mo) which was printed by Moscow State. It was 35-40 pages in total with the preface and the contents.
By the way, when I taught Russian in the USA nearly 20 years ago I had that trimmed to 10 pages for the beginners.
The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying to use rules and logic. They can memorise any number of phrases, the most obscure lexics, etc but they cannot memorise and use formal grammar. At all. As a result they have no problem with French, Spanish, etc but with Russian they hit a wall and run away screaming that it is too hard.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/