IN SOUTH KOREA people who want to look something up on the internet don’t “Google it”. Instead they “ask Naver”. Naver is 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 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.
Although Google is having trouble making any headway in South Korea, it may have more of a chance in China, where the market leader, Baidu, has been hit by a series of scandals. Last September, at the height of the scandal over melamine-tainted milk, rumours began to spread that Baidu had accepted payment to expunge stories on the subject from its search results. Baidu denied any wrongdoing. A few weeks later the firm was accused of giving prominence in its search results, in return for payment, to unlicensed drugs companies. This led to speculation in the local media that web users might be turning against Baidu. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185891
Korea is a society that is very closed off to the outside world. This applies to both North and South Korea. While North Korea is currently known as the "Hermit Kingdom", the whole of the peninsula was known by this moniker in the 19th and early 20th century. South Korea is a country where neither Apple's iPhone nor any Nokia product is available for sale. Neither can one use a blackberry here. It is a nation where both Walmart and Carrefour were forced to abandon the market after being squeezed by both xenophobic consumers and suppliers. A country where angry thousands filled the streets of the capital to keep out US beef which has been described as "uniquely harmful to Korean bodies". When living in Pohang, Korea, a city of 600 thousand, I was able to find only one ATM in the entire city that accepted an overseas debit card. It therefore, comes as no surprise that Google is having a hard time in Korea. This is a society that is simply out of step with the world and does not accept "other".