Seeking Success

摘要

In south korea people who want to look something up on the internet don't "Google it". Instead they "ask Naver". Among the 35m South Koreans who use the internet every day, the nine-year-old search engine is wildly popular, accounting for 76% of internet searches, compared with less than 3% each for Yahoo! and Google. Naver owes its popularity, in part, to the fact that it is not just a search engine. Like Yahoo!, it is also a portal, drawing together news, e-mail, discussion groups, stockmarket information, videos, restaurant reviews and so on. Some 17m people visit its homepage every day and since January they have been able to customise it according to their own tastes.rnBut Naver is also dominant-too dominant, say some-because it caters to the interests of South Koreans. "Yahoo! and Google have a very American, English-based search engine," says Chae Hwi-Young, the chief executive of nhn, Naver's parent company. If you go to Google and type in "rain", for example, the result is lots of pages about water falling from the sky. In South Korea, however, it makes more sense to return pages, as Naver does, about a popular singer and actor called Rain.