Examining Naver the Korean Search Engine
If you are entering a market with a Googly-only search strategy in South Korea, you are limiting youself to audience reach. This is because South Korea has another popular search engine that most Koreans use, Naver. It’s estimated that Google holds between 70% and 85% of the South Korean search market, with challenger and South Korean native search engine Naver holding between 15% and 30%.
So why is Naver popular in Korea and what differences does it have to Google?
When a user types a certain key word into the Naver search engine, Naver returns a results divided into categories. It returns a few websites that are most popular in your search, then specific results that your search category falls into (shopping/books), then blog searches, café searches(online Naver communities), videos, and posts and so on. The results of the searches are divided into categories and a few related and most relevant of contents of each of the categories are displayed. This helps the user know what content category they are looking at and search in that order. The user can view short previews of these categories as they scroll down. These categories can also be reached quickly through the tab bar. Another interesting feature in Naver is the most popular searches that appear on the main search site. Naver Ranks the most popular searches that have occurred in the recent hour. In this section information on a new celebrity issue or a political announcement is usually posted. This part of Naver search engine is prone to information cascade. In fact, this is exactly what this part of Naver depends upon. It shows the popular, hot topic trends that are going on in the World right now by showing what topics other people are interested in. So as a Naver user you are likely to click on the most popular search and contribute to the information cascade.
Naver has additional features to its search engine such as Naver shopping, blog, café, news, webtoon(cartoons), webnovels, navermap, naver encyclopedia, knowledge person(where you ask question and get then answered by naver, like quora but naver dominating this), and naver dictionary and music. Naver’s content mostly contain information on the South Korean population and sheds insight into the tendencies of people in South Korea. It gives a more ‘community feel’ to people in South Korea which is why it is more favoured compared to Google sometimes. For example, Naver Map is customized to South Korea, and offers more information like subway maps, bus routes, places to eat information better tailored to the user.
Further study is needed to uncover what biases search engines such as Naver which are mostly targeted to a certain culture have and whether they will continue to survive as our society continues to get more globalized.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/naver-seo-best-practices-south-korea/307623/#close