Forum Moderators: open
------------
Well, I've been saying g should set up an R&D center in Korea for like...2 years now. and finally...THEY ARE! woot! (committed to $10 million over next two years)...
perhaps that means you guys out "west" will finally see some the cool stuff out here in Korea popping up via Google Labs in time. :) (save me a ton of writing. lol)
guess we'll finally get to find out.^_^;;
but in another more "biggish" move that I find interesting... is Google Korea just entered an agreement with SK Telecom to develop a next-gen mobile search platform. Given Koreas ahead of the curve mobile phones and content and g's search tech... this should make for some very interesting stuff.
Keep in mind, SK Telecom itself is a monster company (part of the SK group)... it has the lion's share of the mobile market here (aournd 52%, I believe), and is the owner of recently acquired number 3/4 portal Empas (one of Google's few Adsense distribution partners here) AND owns Cyworld (the benchmark for the social networking, phenomenon of "mini-hompies" and pre-dates myspace, circles etc).
so this the makings of a very integrated in-bed with each partnership on many fronts.
Given G hasn't made a dent here in the search market (my last check shows them at 0.8% of the market... 1.5 seems high) and never really seeming to know what to do here... I would take this as a move as a "skip the middle man" (competing with dominate naver in search) and just using the market as a test bed for stuff to release in CHina or the USA etc. And then when mobile finally comes into its own in west...they will already have to cool way ahead search stuff from their work wiht SK.
like the article says...
without buying a local portal here...or making drastic changes to biz strategies just for korea (though both always a possibility still), I doubt G Korea will come "into their" own for a long long time (if ever)...
so.... in other words, good move! FINALLY. =P
beats the google bus. lol
article [times.hankooki.com]
Mobile search, eh? Google's efforts in Japan's mobile space have been going on since 2001. They're getting deals with more carriers in Japan now, but I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the results.
Mobile search is tough because of the phones used in Asia. We generally have much better phones than the rest of the planet. However, they're also proprietary in a lot of ways that benefit the carrier. Content that works particularly well with these phones is usually only offered through the carrier's portal or affiliated sites. This walled garden approach has made it tough for traditional SEs to make inroads into the mobile markets here.
My biggest complaint against Google's mobile search in Japan has been that the SERPs are littered with sites and pages that are not compatible with my phone's browser. If they haven't been able to get this right in 5+ years of development in Japan I wonder how they'll fare in Korea.
