http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/04/business/naver.php


Crowd's wisdom helps South Korean search engine beat Google and Yahoo
By Choe Sang-Hun

Wednesday, July 4, 2007



SEOUL: Park Hye Ran, a 15-year-old high-school girl, wanted to know the shortest route from a bus terminal in the southern port city of Busan to a fish market to the east.

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 of the market area.

"When people I have never met thank me, I feel good," Cho said. "No one pays me for this. But helping other people on the Internet is addictive. I spend three hours a day on this work by cutting down on my sleeping time."

Thanks to Cho and tens of thousands of other volunteer respondents, Web users in one of the world's most-wired countries seldom "Google" anything - they "Naver" it.

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

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

Google, which became the world's top search engine based largely on its spare, no-frills interface, barely registers in the country's online consciousness, handling just 1.7 percent of Korean Web searches, according to KoreanClick, an Internet market research company.

"No matter how powerful Google's search engine may be, it doesn't have enough Korean-language data to trawl to satisfy South Korean customers," said Wayne Lee, an analyst at Woori Investment and Securities.

Naver's success surprised many. When NHN, an online gaming company, set up the search portal in 1999, the site looked like a grocery store where most of the shelves were empty. Like Google, Naver found that with few people other than Koreans using the language, there simply was not enough Korean text in cyberspace to make a Korean search engine a viable business.

"So we began creating Korean-language text," said Lee Kyung Ryul, an NHN spokesman. "At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database."

The strategy was right on the money. In this country, where over 70 percent of a population of 48 million use the Internet, most of them with high-speed connections, people do not just want information when they log on; they want a sense of community and the kind of human interaction provided by Naver's "Knowledge iN" real-time question-and-answer platform.

Each day, on average, 16 million people visit Naver - whose name comes from the English words neighbor and navigator - keying 110 million queries into its standard, Google-like search function. But Naver users also post an average of 44,000 questions a day through Knowledge iN, the interactive Q & A database. These receive about 110,000 answers, ranging from one-sentence replies to academic essays complete with footnotes.

The format, which Naver introduced in 2002, has become a must-have feature for Korean search portals. The portals maintain the questions and answers in proprietary databases not shared with other portals or with search engines like Google. When a visitor to a portal does a Web search, its search engine yields relevant items from its own Q & A database along with traditional search results from news sites and Web pages.

Naver has so far accumulated a user-generated database of 70 million entries. Typical queries include why North Korea is building a nuclear bomb, which digital music player is best, why people have hair whorls and what a high-school boy should do when he has a crush on a female teacher.

Lacking the full-time editorial oversight found on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, some Naver entries are of dubious veracity and attract vigorous rebuttals. But many respondents, keen to build and maintain an online reputation, do careful research to provide useful answers.

"I am no scholar, but I know how to get from place A to B in my town," said Cho, who so far has answered 2,520 Knowledge iN questions, mostly about traffic routes in Busan. "The best thing about Knowledge iN is that you can pick people's brains whenever you want."

Leveraging the so-called "collective intelligence" of Web users has become a way of life in South Korea, and has dramatically changed people's assumptions about what they can accomplish online.

Thanks to its success in the search engine market, NHN is now the country's most profitable Internet firm. The company, which employs 2,700 workers, posted 299 billion won, or $325 million, in profit out of 573 billion won in sales last year. It has a market value of nearly 8 trillion won.

The company also runs a popular online gaming site, known as Hangame in South Korea and Japan and Ourgame in China. But its Naver search engine - which sells advertisements and links to commercial Web sites that pop up when a user searches for certain words - generated 52 percent of NHN's revenues last year. Naver took 61 percent of all Web search-related ads last year in South Korea, according to the company.

As with the product reviews found on Amazon.com or the seller feedback mechanism on eBay, Naver users are invited to rate the quality of posted answers. Naver and the other Korean portals also have monitors who screen out pornography, libel, copyrighted material and advertisements.

Park, the high-school girl, gave Cho's answer a perfect five-star rating and thanked him through Naver's instant messaging service. To reward Cho's active supply of quality answers in the past two years, Naver recently named him an "honorary intellectual," a status coveted among Naver contributors.

When Daum, Naver's largest local competitor, began making a big push into the Korean search engine market last year, it turned to its 6.7 million virtual "Internet cafés," which are not the physical structures the term usually refers to but online user groups built around shared interests.

The biggest cafés, which have up to three million members, create massive pools of material supplied by people who, for example, went to the same school, support or oppose a free-trade agreement with the United States or share an interest in hiking in the mountains.

Opening up its cafés to its search engine, Daum's market share increased by nearly 30 percent in two years. It took in 22.8 billion won in ad revenue in the first quarter of this year, up 42 percent from a year ago.

Google, which started its search service in the Korean language in 2000, is not just sitting back.

"It's obvious to me that Korea is a great laboratory of the digital age," Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in Seoul on May 30, when Google unveiled an upgraded Korean-language service. It also opened a research lab here in 2006 and is in talks with Daum about the possibility of sharing content and technology.

Google's new Korean version deviates from the search engine's celebrated bare-bones style. Its simpler-is-better approach never caught on in South Korea, where people prefer portal sites that resemble department stores, filled with eye-catching animation and multiple features.

"Rather than depending solely on a mechanical formula, South Korean portals also use people to monitor keyword trends and determine which category of information should be placed at the top of the screen when displaying the search results," said Kim Hyun Min, an analyst at Korea Investment and Securities.

Yahoo Korea, once the country's top portal but now a distant third in the search market with a 4.4 percent share, is not only adopting the local taste but is exporting it to Yahoo services elsewhere in the world. Yahoo Korea's Q & A service, started after Naver's, has become the basis for similar Yahoo services in 21 countries, including the English-language Yahoo Answers.

"We find that we can catch advanced Internet trends in South Korea and develop better services and introduce them to Yahoo operations elsewhere in the world," said Kim Jin Su, Yahoo Korea's chief executive.



대중의 지식에 힘입어 구글과 야후 물리치는 네이버
(Crowd's wisdom helps South Korean search engine beat Google and Yahoo / Choe Sang-Hun )

네이버는 인터넷 상에서 서로 돕는 한국인의 경향을 이용해 한국의 인터넷 검색 부문에서 절대 강자가 됐음.

수만명의 한국인들이 (인터넷에 게재된 질문에)자발적으로 답변하는 덕분에 한국인들은 구글보다는 네이버를 통해 인터넷 검색을 해. 이처럼 일반인들에 의해 무료로 창출되는 콘텐츠에 힘입어 네이버는 한국 검색시장에서 점유율이 77%를 넘어서. 다음과 야후 코리아는 네이버의 뒤를 이어 각각 10.8%, 4.4%임.

인터넷 시장조사기관 코리안클릭에 따르면, 간결 단순한 인터페이스를 기반으로 세계 최고 검색포털이 된 구글은 한국 시장에서 점유율이 1.7%로 인지도가 거의 없어.

우리투자증권 애널리스트 웨인 이, “구글의 검색엔진이 아무리 강력하더라도 한국 고객들을 만족시킬 만큼 한국어 자료가 충분하지는 않아”

네이버의 성공은 많은 사람들을 놀라게 했음. 인구 4,800만명 중 70% 이상이 인터넷 사용자이고 그 중 대부분이 초고속인터넷을 이용하는 한국의 국민들은 인터넷에서 정보뿐만 아니라 공동체 의식과, 네이버 ‘지식iN’의 실시간 질문 답변 서비스가 제공하는 인간 상호작용과 같은 것도 원해

온라인게임 회사인 NHN이 1999년 검색포털인 네이버를 설립했을 때 네이버는 진열대가 대부분 비어있는 슈퍼마켓 같아 보였음. 구글과 마찬가지로, 네이버는 한국인 외에 한국어를 사용하는 사람이 거의 없는 가운데 인터넷 상에 한국어 텍스트가 충분치 않아 한국 검색엔진의 사업성이 낮다는 것을 깨달았음.

NHN 홍보팀 과장 이경률, “그래서 우리는 한국어 텍스트를 만들어내기 시작했음. 구글 사용자들은 인터넷에 이미 존재하는 자료를 검색해. 한국에서는 검색엔진이 되려면 자신만의 데이터베이스를 만들어야 해”

네이버는 평균적으로 일일 방문자수가 1,600만명, 일일 검색어수가 1억1천만개에 달해. 그러나 네이버 사용자들은 지식iN에서 하루 평균 4만4천개의 질문과 11만개의 답변을 게시해

네이버가 2002년 도입한 지식iN과 같은 형태의 서비스는 한국 검색포털들이 반드시 제공해야 하는 기능이 됐음. 인터넷 사용자들의 이른바 “공동지식”을 활용하는 것은 한국에서 생활방식이 됐으며 온라인에서 무엇이 가능한가에 대한 사람들의 생각을 크게 바꿔놓았음.

한국 검색포털들은 질문과 답변을 다른 포털 및 검색엔진들과 공유하지 않는 자체 데이터베이스에 저장해

지식iN은 무료 온라인 백과사전인 위키피디아처럼 상시적인 검사 수정이 이뤄지지 않아 일부 답변들은 정확성이 의심스럽고 강한 반박에 직면하기도 해. 그러나 대다수 사용자들은 온라인 명성을 쌓고 유지하기 위해 신중하게 조사하고 답변해

아마존닷컴의 제품리뷰와 이베이의 판매자 피드백 시스템과 같이, 네이버 사용자도 게시된 답변의 질을 평가하도록 요청받아. 또한 네이버 등 한국 포털들은 포르노, 비방, 저작권을 침해하는 자료, 광고 등을 검열 삭제하는 감시요원들을 두고 있어

한국에서 네이버의 최대 경쟁업체인 다음은 지난해 국내 검색엔진 시장점유율 확대에 나서면서 다음에 개설된 670만개의 가상 ‘인터넷 카페’의 힘을 빌렸음.

최대 규모의 카페들은 총 회원수가 3백만명 가량에 이르며 방대한 규모의 자료 풀(pool)을 만들어내. 이 자료들은 회원들이 제공해

다음은 이들 카페를 검색엔진에 등록해 검색이 가능하도록 하면서 지난 2년간 시장점유율이 30% 가량 상승했음. 다음의 올 1분기 광고 매출은 228억원으로 전년동기비 42% 증가했음.

2000년에 한국어 검색서비스를 시작한 구글도 밀려나 있지만은 않아

구글 회장 에릭 슈미트, 5월 30일 서울에서 업그레이드된 한국어 서비스를 공개하면서, “한국이 디지털 시대의 거대한 실험실임이 분명해 보여”. 또한 구글은 2006년 한국에 R&D센터를 설립했으며 현재 다음과 콘텐츠 및 기술의 공유 가능성에 대해 협의 중임.

구글은 요점만 보여주는 간결한 방식으로 유명한데, 한국어 신규 버전은 이 방식을 따르지 않아. 간결할수록 좋다는 구글의 접근법은 한국에서 결코 눈길을 끌지 못했음. 한국인들은 시선을 끄는 애니메이션과 다양한 기능들로 가득한 백화점식 포털을 선호해

한국투자증권 애널리스트 김현민, “한국 포털들은 기술적 측면에만 의존하기보다는 사용자들을 통해 주요 경향을 파악하고 어떤 종류의 정보가 검색결과를 보여줄 때 화면 상단에 위치해야 하는지 결정해”

한때 한국 검색시장에서 1위였으나 이제는 뒤로 밀려나 3위에 올라있는 야후 코리아는 이 같은 국내 취향을 수용할 뿐만 아니라 세계 다른 지역의 야후 서비스에 전수하고 있어

네이버의 지식iN 이후 시작된 야후 코리아의 ‘지식Q&A’는 21개국의 유사한 야후 서비스의 기반이 됐음.

야후 코리아 대표 김진수, “우리는 한국에서 앞서가는 인터넷 경향을 파악해 보다 우수한 서비스로 개발하고 세계 다른 지역의 야후 지사에 이를 소개해”

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