S Korean search engine beats Google and Yahoo

Park Hye-ran, a 15-year-old girl, wanted to know the shortest route from a bus terminal in Busan to a fish market. That is precisely the kind of question Cho In-joon, 50, a seller of lottery tickets in Busan, loves to answer.

Park Hye-ran, a 15-year-old girl, wanted to know the shortest route from a bus terminal in Busan to a fish market. That is precisely the kind of question Cho In-joon, 50, a seller of lottery tickets in Busan, loves to answer.

Sitting at a computer installed at his street kiosk, Cho posted a reply for Park—and for other Naver.com users who might one day ask the same question—with instructions on where she should switch trains, where she should disembark, which station exit she should take and how long it would take to walk from there to the market. He even attached a map.

“When people I have never met thank me, I feel good,” Cho said. “No one pays me. But helping other people on the Internet is addictive.”

Tapping a South Korean inclination to help one another on the Web has made Naver.com the leader of Internet search in the country. It handles 77 per cent of all Web searches in South Korea, thanks largely to content generated by people like Park and Cho, free of charge.

Daum.net, another South Korean search portal, comes in second with a 10.8 per cent share, followed by Yahoo’s Korean-language service with 4.4 per cent.

Google, which became the top search engine in the world, handling just 1.7 per cent of South Korean Web searches, according to KoreanClick, an Internet market research company. “No matter how powerful Google’s search engine may be,” said Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Investment and Securities, “it doesn’t have enough Korean-language data to trawl to satisfy South Korean customers.”