Introduction
Impact of Google on the World Wide Web is indescribably great these days. Google is a search engine that has 500 millions of visitors every month, 8 billions of web pages and a billion of web images in its search server. Also, it has 158 domains with 36 different languages throughout the world, and brand value of 70 billion dollars which is the number one ranking in the world. While Google is expanding its influence in many countries, it is quite interesting that Google has been failing in South Korean market despite their hard works in last five years. According to comScore, the market share of Google in South Korea was about 4.5%, while market share in most of the American and European countries were at least over 60%. I would like to analyze why this is the case and suggest possible strategies that Google can implement in order to dominate South Korean market.
Market share of search engines in Korea (2010/10/19~11/16)
Main page of Naver
Reasons
The first reason for Google’s failure in Korean market can be explained by market domination of Korean search engines. According to the research from Korean institutions, Naver, the search engine founded by a Korean company, has 65.5% of market share and Daum, another search engine founded by a Korean company, has 23.5% of the market share in Korean search engine market. As it is mentioned above, Google Korea has only 4.5% of the market share. Naver is successful in Korean market because it offers a search service that reflects the characteristics of Korean Internet users. According to the research, most of the Korean web users connect to the Internet for entertainment purposes. Naver has succeeded in taking advantage of such characteristics of Korean web users by offering appropriate services. While the main page of Google is simple and optimized for searching, the main page of Naver is somewhat complicated and full of information. However, Naver provides useful and entertaining links such as trendy search keywords, web cartoons, and news headlines that attract web users’ attention and make them to actually “surf” the web.
Knowledge search service provided by Naver
Naver has also successfully differentiated its search service with other search engines by providing categorized search services. One of the most successful categorization based service is called knowledge search service, as known as KiN (Knowledge In) in Korea. It is basically a huge categorized bulletin board where people ask every kind of questions and the others answer them. It is different from the bulletin boards in other online communities since the board is managed by Naver itself and the threads containing questions and answers are shown in the search result when the users search about related topics. For example, when the users search for “Computer” in Google, it shows definition of computer, websites of computer companies like Dell, and online magazines about computer. In Naver, questions and answers about computer, such as “Are products from this computer company good?” or “Can I play Civilization V with this desktop computer?”, are shown in the search result. With the success of knowledge search service, Naver added many kinds of targeted search service like shopping search, person search, book search, blog search, and news search and displays each search result in categorized manner. Some people might think that search results from Google are more helpful and informative, but the important thing is that Korean web users are more used to this kind of search result. One of the main principles that websites must follow is that web pages must show things that users are expect to see. Since Korean web users are used to such kind of search result, they get frustrated when they see search results from Google as it shows plain text with almost no categorization of the results.
Daum Agora provided by Daum
The second reason for Google’s failure in Korean market is that Google Korea has failed to adjust itself to the Korean culture. Traditionally, Korean culture is highly related with community spirit and humanism. As a result, Korean websites are highly related with online communities. There are millions of active online communities in Korea discussing about different kinds of topics and millions of personal blogs that share information and encourage communications. Naver successfully reflected this kind of Korean culture by offering knowledge search service, as introduced above. Daum has its unique service called Daum Agora, which also reflects the characteristics of Korean culture. Daum Agora is a huge bulletin board where web users post all kinds of petitions and signature-seeking campaigns. If other people agree with the issue posted in threads, they can put their signatures by clicking the specific button. Popular issues with the most signatures are introduced in both main page of Daum Agora and corresponding search results. The service was very successful. Daum Agora attracted people’s attention and some of the posts regarding sensitive issues such as toughening up prison sentences for sex crimes gained huge attention and were actually discussed in the National Assembly. However, Google is far away from being an online community as their search algorithm is solely based on certain algorithms, which doesn’t have any humanism at all. As a result, there are some structural issues for Google to apply the characteristics of Korean users, which can be explained as spreading knowledge by asking and answering, in its search service. The Associated Press points out this in its article. The article quotes words of Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch, mentioning about the Google’s failure in Korea. He says that although Google has the most powerful and large database in the world, it cannot face against with database of Korean search engines, which is based on humanism.
HD live sports broadcasting service provided by Naver
The third reason for Google’s failure in Korean market is that Korea has an excellent information and communications infrastructure that Korean web users are used to high-end graphics on the web. Internet propagation rate of South Korea is 70.5%, which is the largest rate among the world. Also, average Internet connection speed in Korea is way faster than that of any other countries including United States. As a result, most of the Korean websites include various graphics such as Adobe Flash and high quality videos, as most of the Korean web users can actually see them in real-time manner. This is also true for Korean search engines such as Naver, as they contain lots of Adobe Flash and HD videos. For example, Naver provides HD video service for news and live sports broadcasting. However, Google has much less graphics in its web pages as they are optimized for countries with poor information and communications infrastructure. It is obvious that Korean web users will prefer to surf websites with high-end graphics rather than websites with just plain texts and simple images.
The last reason for Google’s failure in Korean market is that Google Korea has not enough services that are localized to Korea. The most critical problem is that in its database, Google Korea has not enough Korean based websites compared to English based websites. Due to the lack of Korean based websites linked to the Google, when the user searches for “Slayer” in Korean, Google shows websites about one of the ex-president of Korea as one of the blogger put his name and the word “Slayer” together in his blog, which is definitely not the correct search result for the word “Slayer”. Services of Google such as Google Earth or Google Maps are also not well localized in Korea. In Google Earth, satellite images of Korean territories have very low resolutions compared to those of United States territories. In Google Maps, services that are provided in United States such as showing driving directions are not provided in Korea. Therefore, it is natural that Korean web users move toward Korean search engines, which are optimized for them. The article from the Associated Press says that Google was too conceit and confident about their search service that they did not devote much effort to succeed in Korean market.
Possible Solutions
Although Google Korea has been unsuccessful, it does not mean that Google Korea will suffer forever in the Korean market. Google has a potential to be successful in Korean market although it is relatively a newcomer among other Korean search engines. First, Google has a powerful search technology that has been proved in many other countries. As searching technology is becoming more important to the search engines, if Google succeeds in properly adopting their technologies into Korean web environment and integrating its high-end technologies with Korean culture, it will give huge advantages to Google in competing against major Korean search engines.
Main page of Google Korea in 2008
However, integrating technologies with Korean culture does not necessarily mean that they have to follow the search engines that are currently popular in Korea. Few years ago, Google Korea has changed their homepage into “Naver-like” instead of plain homepage with the logo and the search box; they added contents that show currently trending topics, popular blogs, and popular people in the main page. However, it did not bring a lot of difference in the market share, and they finally switched back to their old homepage. This incidence implies that simply imitating other popular search engines is not enough for Google to succeed in Korean market, as it will result in users to stick with the existing Korean search engines if the interfaces are similar. Instead, Google must develop their own strategies that can attract Korean web users’ attention. Google is in the dominant position in search technologies and cloud service such as Gmail and Google Docs. If Google can successfully “Glocalize” their high-end technologies to Korea, I believe Google will have a huge chance of winning in Korean market.
Second, as Google is a leader of Web 2.0, which is a rising trend in the Korean web environment, it is superior to the Korean search engines as they are less prepared to the Web 2.0 market. Third, Koreans’ low level of awareness of Google can be a chance. Since Koreans are used to their own search engines such as Naver and Daum, fairly lot of Koreans still don’t know much about Google. It is mostly because in early 2000s, Naver and Daum implemented aggressive marketing strategy to advertise their search engines. Google can also gain attention of Korean web users with aggressive marketing of their company. Commercialization of Google’s Android technology is also a chance for Google. As more and more Korean smart phones are choosing Android OS as their operating system, more and more Koreans will get to know about Google.
Conclusion
As Google declared Korean market as one of the most important market in the world, they would not stop trying to dominate Korean market. Their will is shown by establishing R&D center in Korea; although Google is serviced in 158 different countries, only few of those countries have R&D center. According to the CEO of Google Korea, the reasons that Google treats Korean market as one of the most important market are that Korea has outstanding IT infrastructure, has lots of IT early adopters and smart engineers, and is rapidly growing advertisement market. In my personal opinion, Google is a powerful company with fascinating search technology and various convenient and useful contents and services. But at this point, Google is underestimated in Korean market because of lack of awareness and cultural differences. It is true that most of the Koreans think that Google’s search engine is powerful but difficult to use in order to get good search results. If Google supplements weaknesses and emphasizes strengths, I believe that Google Korea will possess lots of market share in Korean search engine market in few years.
References
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