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Google Inc. said Wednesday it has overhauled its Korean-language search engine to broaden its appeal in South Korea, one of the world's most wired countries and one of the few where Google isn't dominant.
In particular,
Local search engines such as NHN Corp.'s Naver Web site lead the sector in South Korea. ~ better adapted to factors specific to the market, with more visually complex sites and reliance on human interaction instead of software to get results.
Google has adopted universal search — a results-blending concept that has caught on at other top search engines ...
Hmmm, took them a while. Perhaps they have been reading here as this topic of Alternate Serps [webmasterworld.com] was discussed a long time ago.
What say out Korean members?
Onya
Woz
does that add to the value of the new .Asia domains?
Nope. Koreans use co.kr or .com/.net/.org almost exclusively. I just asked some Korean coworkers and they have never even heard of .asia.
can already guess what some of them will say. wink "Too little. Too late."
At least they seem to be taking local opinion and preferences into consideration. They're heading in the right direction from the sounds of it.
Am I that obvious? :p
"Heading in the right direction" is like saying they actually turned the Google Bus to head East... when driving from California to Korea...via NYC. Google Map not included.
lol.
And as for the actual Universal aka "Combined Search" SERP:
- It still looks like doodoo compared to Korean portal SERPS (so sayeth about 99% of Koreans you might ask) with relatively little interesting media rich content.
- The best local content is still on portals. In fact, when testing... unless search for the EXACT site name or company name specifically (which defeats the purpose), I often can't even find the site I'm specifically looking for via GKorea (if search using what I think would be related keywords). Perhaps a random page that mentions it... if I'm lucky. There are many reasons why, like heavy use of images for writing Korean text...instead of ACTUAL text, and other reasons which I could go into in a separate thread... but there you have it.
- Put this in context: Depending on the keyword "web site or web page" results rank from 5th to 10th down the page of groups of categories of content results (ie: often WAAAAY below the fold -- you have to scroll to even see a single web site result). THAT IS: whatever they do... unless web search itself gets more popular...it doesn't matter what it G Korea's SERP looks like.
*(disclaimer note: I have seen some changes recently with a rise in web site on SERPS --ie: higher on the SERP. We'll have to see if that's trend)
By contrast: "Blog" or "Cafe" (think Yahoo Groups) results are often first (again, illustrating human interaction / UCC related content over simple algo search).
G Korea's best bet still seems to be going the backdoor or alt. route:
- Adsense syndication (this is going well for them)
- Buy local portal site (ideally NHN or Daum, if anyone will actually sell or give them a non-ridiculous price) or other popular site.
- Mobile stuff still has lots of potential, esp given recent trends.
- Crank up the R&D (they built the center...too bad haven't seen anything interesting come out of it yet)
- Multimedia. Talk of google youtube Korea stuff has yet to materialize into anything. And regardless... youtube does as well here as google search.
The truth is, as of now, in terms of search or market share in Korea... if google wasn't google, it really wouldn't even be worth mentioning. +_+
Yet.
(I still have high hopes. ;) )
does that add to the vale of the new .Asia domains?
I'm hedging my bets... I put in my apps for a bunch of .asia domains... but that had nothing to do with google's status.
ie: .ASIA will have little or no effect (its pretty irrelevant as far as I can tell) on how well Google Korea SERPs do in the market or vice versa.
-so sayeth GrendelKhan{TSU} ^^
[edited by: GrendelKhan_TSU at 6:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2008]
