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Google Secretly Strikes Back in Korea [times.hankooki.com]
"We learned male Internet users aged between 25 and 29 moved from Naver to Google last year for some reason," a KoreanClick researcher said."Google's customer base is not a match to Naver or Daum. Yet, it is growing quickly. The pace will accelerate thanks to its policy change on Gmail," he said.
It sounds like the big G still has a long way to go in the Korea, but it's good to see signs of life. So the Google Bus is finally paying off, eh?
Perhaps, but I wouldn't call it a White Wash. ;) sorry, couldn't resist ...
Onya
Woz
still... I asked a bunch of people here about this (ie: as unofficial as it gets) ... but most common reason?
unfiltered access to pr0n and images. LOL .
surprise surprise (notice that seems to nicely correlate with the male 25-29 statistic? lol)
ie: google is of course a better window to the rest of the world... a bit of a backdoor to some of korea's less reputatable sites, but its still outta the loop on all the most "important" local content.
so peeps now understand they can use it for stuff outside the normal, outside of korea and outside the more tightly controlled stuff at naver and daum et al.... which could be a nice market to carve out... but it ain't exactly a coup.
so like, the G bus is on truckin along on the Korean road ... just stuck in a lot of traffic. heh.
That said, one potential break in the gridlock, I'd say is that korean portals/search engines have become INCREDIBLY lacking of organic results (if ANY). more and more and more just paid listings on the first page in every section of the COMBINED search results (long combined SERPs I've talked about). This could be the thing that shoots the portals in the foot and gives room for G in the longrun. But even so, until there is just more korean sites to crawl (all the best stuff is done WITHIN portals or closed communities)...this still might not amount to much. Cart before the horse.
beep beep!
so sayeth GrendelKhan{TSU}
...gives room for G in the longrun. But even so, until there is just more korean sites to crawl (all the best stuff is done WITHIN portals or closed communities)...this still might not amount to much. Cart before the horse.
actually along that line... I noticed that the korean version of the new "Google Apps" stuff doesn't include everything that's offered in the US, but DOES include the google page maker.
hhmmmm....
Read:: "(nudge nudge) hey Korean internet users! Make more (ugly non-korean looking) Korea content here!"
um... well.. ok. I'm sure that's gunna lead to good quality stuff! Good luck with that.
[edited by: GrendelKhan_TSU at 12:57 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2007]
