Google and Globalization in Korea

The following is a letter to the editor that I wrote, published in the Joongang Ilbo

The Internet itself epitomizes globalization, and there is no more prominent indication of this than Google’s success. 

Because the Internet unleashes a flood of information, its users around the world now turn to Google to tame that flood and find the information they need. People in virtually every country of the world now “Google it” to find press coverage, images, videos and more.  Nevertheless, there are four nations in the world in which success seems to elude Google. The Financial Times, in an article accompanied by a map of the non-Google World, reported that Google has failed to achieve success in South Korea, China, Russia and the Czech Republic.  Here in Korea, the major media have made much of how Naver leads the search market and has so far beaten Google. 

However, this claim, like that on behalf of Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and Seznam in the Czech Republic, is sheer nonsense. If you believe the apples and oranges comparison of these four search services with Google, I have a bridge to sell you.

In fact, the services all have two critical limitations. First, they answer search inquiries ONLY in Korean, Russian, Chinese, or Czech, respectively. Second, they do not search or “crawl” the entire Internet, instead focusing only on content in Russian, Chinese, Korean or Czech. Contrast this with Google’s stated mission, “… to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 

A closer look at Naver’s success and the difficulties for Google here actually explains why Google must ultimately succeed in the Korean market. Part of Naver’s success is simply because Koreans feel more comfortable with a service presented entirely in the Korean language.  Despite the national campaign here to learn English, it is well documented that people here feel uncomfortable with situations that demand English, such as job interviews, meeting foreigners and surfing English Web sites. 

Naver also responds to a strong cultural need felt by many Koreans to know what other people are thinking. Hence, its most popular service is called “Knowledge-In.” Users submit questions which other Naver users are encouraged to answer, creating an ever increasing base of “knowledge.” 

The crucial limitation is that Naver’s database, because it is a Korean language-only service, effectively excludes most of the world’s knowledge.  In this respect, one can argue that Naver is more of a social-networking site than a search engine. Google, of course, allows searching in Korean as well as English and returns Web pages in both languages. 

Naver also relies heavily on “sponsored” searches, a model pioneered by Overture and Yahoo. With this business model, any company, organization or individual can pay to have its search results appear higher in the list of results from any search inquiry. 

Search results in Naver contain several categories of sponsored search. Consequently, commercial entities with the money to pay for Web-based promotion, dominate in Naver search results. So why must Google succeed in the South Korean market? 

The answer is because the flood of information that is available electronically and digitally via the Internet is multilingual. Although English may be the dominant language of international business today, other languages are important. Google’s robots search, or attempt to search, this entire universe of information on the Internet, whatever the language.  This explains Google’s interest in automated translation from one language to another and why its translation service now represents the best available machine translation. 

Whatever Google’s weaknesses, its global scope and goals are surely its strength.  Take a specific example from the field of education and study abroad, currently a booming business here. If a Korean parent or student does a search on Naver for “study abroad in the U.S.”, they will typically receive a page of search results that are sponsored by the dominant commercial study-abroad institutes in South Korea.  While those results may serve the promotional needs of private institutes, they may not fit the needs of the individual student or family.  They also may fail to contain the most current information placed on the Internet by the U.S. schools, colleges and universities themselves.  For such information - you guessed it - we advise parents and students to “Google it.”

For Korea to fully participate in the global information society, a higher portion of its students, teachers, government officials and business personnel will need to more effectively find and utilize the information available through the Internet. As things stand, this means embracing Google or a service like it, rather than simply enjoying the Korean-language province of the Web, which is now dominated by Naver.  South Korea has embraced the notion that English fluency is one key to its future role in the global information society.  The nation might do well to also monitor use of Google as an important index of globalization here.

Naver, Korea's "Walled Garden" and Economic Democracy

As reported in the Joongang Daily and other Korean papers today, "The government’s first IT target in its campaign for “economic democratization” is Naver, the nation’s largest Web portal site, and its aggressive expansion into various services. (click on the accompanying graphic to see a full-sized version) The Fair Trade Commission is currently conducting an investigation into NHN, the operating company of Naver." The investigation is in line with the government's economic democratization drive, aimed at creating a sound online market that protects small players.

To place this news in larger perspective, one must consider that Korea is still among a small handful of the world's nations in which Google does not hold a leading market share.  Google's near-universal popularity is based on the fact that its robots index the largest portion of the so-called "visible web."  Consequently, people interested in a comprehensive search for information use Google.  Incidentally, my undergraduate students at KAIST, both Korean and international overwhelmingly favor Google as a search engine.
As readers of this blog will know I've been very interested in the continued popularity of Naver, given the dramatic differences with Google in terms of what it does.  (see numerous posts by entering "Naver" in the search bar at the right)  Basically, Naver deals exclusively with Korean language source material and formats its search results in a manner that appeals to Koreans.   It appears much more like a web portal than a search engine and its most popular feature, by far, is called "knowledge-in," which allows users to ask a question, which is then answered in Korean by other Naver users.  Naturally, the "knowledge-in" database has grown tremendously over the years.
The most interesting thing about the current news of an FTC investigation is that Naver epitomizes the continuing "walled garden" character of Korea's internet.  Whatever else one may say on the matter, those who rely on Naver search results are choosing from a relatively small universe of Korean-language content, rather than the far larger universe of content on the visible web.  In today's global economy, it would seem that Korea's efforts to move in the direction of stronger software, content and services will eventually mean a shift from the heavy reliance on Naver toward Google or other search tools, yet to come, that are more global in their scope.

More on Naver vs. Google

According to an article in the Korea Times today, Naver takes pride in being one of the planet's few internet companies that can claim to be a "Google Beater."  The other three countries, as mentioned in earlier posts on this blog, are China, Russia and the Czech Republic.
The article further noted that Naver has improved its search results in order to recognize the search habits of individuals so that they can be provided with the type of information they prefer.  As if this weren't enough, the article states that Naver "...doesn't want to hear talk about an open web environment."
Altogether, this article provides convincing evidence that Naver is not really an internet search service.   Rather, it is a walled garden Korean-language database which tells Koreans what other Koreans think about things.  While the internet is global, Naver tends to be national and rather narrowly so.
Contrast Naver's goals with the mission of Google, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."  Google operates in all the world's major languages while Naver excludes all but Korean. This is not simply a matter of language.  It also extends to internet content--books, videos, blogs and all of it.  Naver simply ignores most of the world's information.  Let's assume a user wants to see whether a book has been written about some topic in European history.   Would sh/e use Naver or Google?    I think the answer is clear.

The issue of Naver's market dominance in Korea

Earlier this Spring, the local press reported that Naver would be one of the companies targeted by the Park Geun-hye government in its campaign for "economic democratization."  Today the Joongang Daily carried another lengthy article dealing with Naver's dominance in the search market, both for desktop PCs and mobile devices.  (click on the accompanying graphic to see a full-size version)  The article quotes representatives of several small start-up companies and basically argues that Naver is stifling economic creativity.
I think it is clear that a large majority of Koreans presently prefer Naver's Korean language services.  Like Americans and people in most other countries of the world who use Google, the Korean public also prefers to find information quickly and efficiently, which contributes to their use of a single source, Naver, and its market dominance.
What I think is missing from the Joongang Daily analysis is the global context.   Naver, for all its strengths in serving the Korean-language public here on the peninsula and around the globe, is a "walled garden" that effectively ignores the majority of internet content which appears in English and other languages (on this topic see my earlier posts). (or here, or use the search box in the right hand column and search for "Naver")

Why Google Must Succeed in Korea, for Korea's Benefit

I have read umpteen articles in recent months that note Google's lack of success in penetrating the South Korean search market.  As shown by the accompanying graphic, Korea and China are two stunning examples of markets in which Google is struggling.   Many of the recent media reports extoll the virtues of Korea's own search engines, especially Naver, with its "Knowledge-in" feature that is so popular here.  The clear implication is that Google's streamlined web pages, that return clean, well organized search results, are somehow inferior to the wealth of organized information returned by a Naver search.  In an effort to achieve some clarity here as to what is happening with "search" in the Korean market, consider the following:

• Naver returns only Korean-language results, coming from its own databases, rather than crawling the internet as googlebots do.
• Whereas Naver is a Korean networking site where you can search for answers to your questions in Korean, it does not even claim to search the vast non-Korean parts of the Internet.  Google has a more ambitious goal, to explore the whole internet, including all of its languages. 
• The preceding realities mean that search results in Google will typically be far more complete and comprehensive than those in Naver or similar Korean search engines.
• In addition to the scope or comprehensiveness of a search, there is the question of sponsorship bias, or the role of money. Google provides search results that help you find information about the topic of your interest, while Naver will tell you everything that sponsors want you to know and have paid for you to know about that topic. 

If you are skeptical about the last bullet point, take any search topic, open two tabs in your browser, and do a search for the term using both English and 하국말 as you please.  Earlier this afternoon, I did side-by-side Naver and Google searches using the term "Community College" in English and  "커뮤니티컬리지" in Korean.  The results are very revealing.  For an interesting blog posting related to this topic, see the Waiguoren's Weblog posting from September 2007.
Because the leading Korean search engine, Naver, has limited its search offerings to the Korean language, it is "searching" and building only a small part of global cyberspace.  While I agree that Korea and Korean language searching are very important, they should not be presented to Korean netizens as the ultimate solution to search.   In a sense, because of the realities mentioned above, the success of Google in Korea is an important measure of globalization and mindset here.  After all, why should Google not do well in Korea?  Google Korea is a Korean company, hiring Korean employees, and contributing directly to this economy.  Furthermore, its corporate goals seem to very compatible with some of Korea's central aspirations.  Ultimately, for Korea to succeed in the information age, it will need to be fully and seriously engaged in the internet search market, not narrowly focused on Korean-language-only social networking.  The success, even if moderate, of Google Korea, can be a great help to this country in achieving its economic goals.  The failure of Google Korea, in the absence of a better search algorithym and method, will not bode well for this nation.  There is a great deal more to be said on this topic.  More later.  In the meantime, I'd like to hear what the rest of you think.

Google Under Scrutiny in Korea

Even in this information age, the major nations and cultures of East Asia often seem inscrutable to the mainstream western press. Since mid-April, the international media, led by business writers and technology blogs have been abuzz with news from South Korea. There, two leading internet portals, Naver and Daum, had lodged a complaint against Google with the Korea Fair Trade Commission, the nation’s competition and antitrust regulator. They alleged that Google unfairly used its status in the mobile industry to make it difficult or impossible for competing search services to be installed on Android devices in Korea. By forming a marketing partnership with major smartphone producers, so the complaint reasoned, Google had unfairly created a new ecosystem in which the Android system was offered free as a way to control the market.Furthermore, Google’s 15-20 percent share of Korea’s mobile search market could not possibly reflect the free choices of mobile carriers and manufacturers since Google controls only a small single-digit share of fixed line internet search in Korea. Google responded to the complaint with a statement that “carrier partners are free to decide which applications and services to include on their Android phones.” However, as widely reported thus far, news of the complaint against Google in South Korea fits into a familiar and most plausible story line. Many reports have explicitly linked Korean developments to the investigation of Google launched last year by the European Commission, and the complaint filed earlier this year by Microsoft. While this story line may be accurate, as far as it goes, it does not go far enough. The developments in Korea deserve closer scrutiny with a bit more historical and cultural context. The following elements should be added to the story to more adequately understand what is occurring with the complaint against Google. First, an acknowledgement that South Korea led the world in constructing nationwide, fast, fiber-optic broadband internet networks. When U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke in 1994 of the need for an “information superhighway”, Korea acted the following year by implementing its ambitious Korea Information Infrastructure (KII) plan. By 1999, the year Naver was launched, PC Rooms had spread throughout Korea and with them such popular multi-player online games as World of Warcraft. The Korean social networking service Cyworld also debuted that year, half a decade before Facebook was invented! Second, while Naver is unquestionably Korea’s most popular internet portal, it is not at all an internet search engine like Google. Naver’s most popular feature, called “Knowledge-in” allows Koreans to input questions that are then answered by other Koreans online. Moreover, regular searches on Naver return pages on which paid advertisements top the results. When compared with Google, Naver appears as a large, Korean-language intranet with social networking and collective intelligence capabilities, rather than a comprehensive internet search tool. Its success underscores the centrality of language to web-surfing behavior. Third, although much of the international reporting mentions the rapid diffusion of smartphones in South Korea, with over ten million currently in use, some relevant history is generally ignored. Although introduced in the U.S. in mid-2007, Apple’s iPhone did not reach the South Korean market until two and a half years later! The combined interests of Korea’s mobile service providers, large handset manufacturers, and government policies led to this unusual set of circumstances. Although Korea was the first nation in the world to commercialize CDMA technology and build nationwide networks with it, public use of these 3G data services remained at extremely low levels through mid-2009, even as the iPhone was proving immensely popular all around the world. Consumers were put off by the high cost of such services, while Korea’s mobile service providers feared the loss of voice revenues to the new VOIP services like Skype. Finally, the extraordinarily rapid diffusion of smartphones here in South Korea, owing partly to pent-up demand, has a decidedly youthful cast. The same young people who were loading Skype onto their iPod Touch devices while awaiting the arrival of the iPhone in 2008 and 2009, and who studied English more avidly than their parent’s generation, were early adopters of the iPhone and Android devices. Interpreted within the above background context, the recent complaint against Google in South Korea has alternative explanations that do not fit so neatly with the story line advanced by most international media. It arose partly out of a natural reluctance on the part of Daum and Naver to see their market share internet search slipping away with the introduction of smart phones. Other explanatory factors are language and more global patterns of internet use by young people. Google’s growing share of Korea’s mobile search market may in fact be driven by web surfers who are discovering a great deal of English and other language content on the wide internet beyond the current search capabilities of Naver. This would also explain why it is not only Google’s share of search that is increasing with the adoption of smart phones, but also use of Facebook and Twitter, social marketing innovations that, like Google, originated in the West.

검색--Language, Culture and Web Searching in Korea

Google is far and away the most popular web search tool in much of the world, but not in Korea. The market leader and most widely-used search engine here is Naver. Launched in June of 1999 and using its own proprietary search engine, reportedly commands nearly 80 percent of the search market in South Korea. Google, despite offering a Korean-language interface, still reportedly controls less than five percent of the market. How can this be? The answer is that Naver is a 100 percent Korean-language solution to search. A "search" on Naver does not search non-Korean language material available on the web. While the Naver database is growing and answering search queries by Koreans in their own language, its current ranking as the fifth largest search portal in the world is simply a matter of the number of Koreans using the portal. Here a couple of critical points deserve to be made. First, Koreans who wish to search the entire internet need to turn to another search utility, such as Google or Yahoo. For example, a Korean student considering study abroad would be well-advised to use these more globally-oriented search engines. Second, because of the Korean-language bias of the Naver search engine, there is a built in limit to its penetration of the internet. It will ultimately only serve those who understand the Korean language. Naver is a business success in Korea and it serves Koreans around the globe. But it has its limits. It also offers a splendid example of how language and culture place boundaries on human communication in this new "information age." More on this topic in future posts.

Google Korea and the Future of Search in Korea

The dominance of Naver, Daum and Empas in the South Korean search market, along with the failure thusfar of Google to garner much market share here, has caught the attention of internet-industry watchers around the world. It is illustrated by the accompanying graphic generated by a search of Google Trends (click on graphic to see a full-size version).  How can it be, many analysts note, that  Google is struggling in the nation with the world's most advanced broadband internet infrastructure?  The answer is largely to be found in language and culture.   Naver is less a search engine than a social-networking internet portal.   It doesn't search the internet.  Instead, it relies on a growing database of Korean-language only material in order to answer queries by Koreans.  As a Korean colleague with considerable internet industry experience told me, "when Koreans search on Naver, they simply want to know what other Koreans are thinking."   Or perhaps they simply want an answer in their own language, and Naver is extremely successful in providing such information.  This explains why its "Knowledge-in" feature is one of the most popular parts of the site.

In broader, more global terms, the very strength of Naver is probably its weakness.  Because it was built by Koreans, for Koreans and in the Korean language, it serves them extraordinarily well for certain purposes.   However, for the same reason, it probably will not do as well in North America, Europe and other international markets.  Also, even for certain purposes here in Korea, Google is superior to Naver.  One example that comes to mind is the many students and parents who are looking for information about study abroad in English speaking countries.  In most instances, they will find more up-to-date information, in both English and Korean, by using Google as their primary search tool.  They will also avoid the pitfall of being overly influenced by "sponsored links" and the web promotion of private study-abroad agencies who pay to sponsor those links.  So, for the benefit of Koreans themselves as well as the future integration of Korea into global cyberspace, we should all hope that Google succeeds here, at least moderately.  More on this topic in future posts.