South Korean Community Based Search Engines

Faced with a lack of Korean-language data and “tapping into a South Korean inclination to help one another on the web” Naver.com has become South Korea’s number one search engine.
The New York Times reports:

When NHN, an online gaming company, set up the search portal in 1999, the site looked like a grocery store where most of the shelves were empty. Like Google, Naver found there simply was not enough Korean text in cyberspace to make a Korean search engine a viable business.

“So we began creating Korean-language text,” said Lee Kyung Ryul, an NHN spokesman. “At Google, users basically look for data that already exists on the Internet. In South Korea, if you want to be a search engine, you have to create your own database.”

But what really separates Naver (which comes from the English words neighbor and navigator) from other search engines is it’s community aspects. They have developed a real-time interactive Q&A database that allows users to post questions about just about anything and receive in-depth answers from complete strangers. On any given day, the system receives about 44,000 questions, and in turn, people posts a remarkable 110,000 answers!

The format, which Naver introduced in 2002, has become a must-have feature for Korean search portals. The portals maintain the questions and answers in proprietary databases not shared with other portals or with search engines like Google. When a visitor to a portal does a Web search, its search engine yields relevant items from its own Q.&A. database along with traditional search results from news sites and Web pages.

NYT: South Koreans Connect Through Search Engine