IT Milk: entry

I mentioned in an earlier post that Google accounts for a ridiculously low amount of search traffic in South Korea. In light of this, there’s an article in the New York Times today that summarizes Korea’s search engine story. So, it turns out that Korean netizens are not as ignorant or stubborn-headed as I had first assumed, because of their cultish flocking around inferior search engines like Naver and Daum instead of Google Korea.

The current Google model will never succeed in Korea because of a lack of Korean content. Although more than 70% of South Koreans are connected to the internet, the country still lags behind in content creation on the web. That’s why my brother’s brand-new soccer blog, which is partially written in Korean ranks number one for all of his blog posts written in Korean.

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.

So where are the other Korean search engines like Naver and Daum getting their content? NYT journalist Sang reveals that user generated content is the trick. The majority of Naver’s search results are filled with blog entries on Naver as well as its Knowledge iN database, which is a clone of Yahoo! Answers. Similarly, Daum’s search results are heavily bulked by articles and forum posts on its Daum Cafes, which are theme-based communities with bulletin boards. Hence, this is the reason for the cluttered community portals in Korea instead of a minimalist user experience that most Americans desire with Google.

Compare and contrast the three major Korean search engine interfaces below:

Naver

Daum

Google Korea

Sorry, Google, looks like you still have a long way to go to catch up with Naver and Daum. You’re going to need to do better than spicing up your design with pretty buttons.