Impact of Naver - Best Blogs Asia
The most popular Korean Search Engine and the fifth most used search engine in the world.
I hadn’t heard of Naver before until a fluke search for other search engines around the world. It functions similar to Google and Yahoo and is in the Korean language.
About Naver
Naver is run by NHNCorp an Internet content service and online games operator headquartered in South Korea.
Naver functions similarly to Google and Yahoo with information search and book search services, desktop search, multimedia search services, music and video search, Internet phone service and mobile search.
Stats and Earnings
NHN announced earnings of the 2008 year with increased sales and income of 30% compared with 2007. Total sales in 2008 reached $8.6 million and net income reached $2.6 hundred million.
Naver owns more than 77 percent of all Web searches originating in South Korea, according to Internet market research company KoreanClick. Each day, on average, 16 million people visit, keying 110 million queries into its standard Google-like search function. “Knowledge iN” a real-time question-and-answer platform, which gets “an average of 44,000 questions a day”. Questions asked range from why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb to which digital music player is best.
Other Sites linked to Naver
There was a launch of its Japanese service in 2009, their first international expansion site.
Junior Naver is a place where children can have fun with various activities, such as games, comics, virtual farms, and making their own avatars. Kids learn many things from that site.
Hangame, South Korea’s first online game portal.
Conclusion
As Comscore states “Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.”
There are other sites gaining ground such as Daum which is the 2nd largest Internet portal in Korea gaining a 20% share in the Korean search market.
There are thoughts that it’s successful user driver content Knowledge search was copied by Yahoo Answers three years earlier and that Google’s Universal Search was based on Naver too.
