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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%.
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.