google and korea
a while ago, i read some articles about google’s emerging relationship with korea. i didn’t archive them anwhere - even on my del.icio.us, which would’ve been so easy and a smart thing to do - so i will need to dig them up again, but here’s one of the articles i read then:
Google recently announced that it would invest at least $10 million on an R&D center in Seoul, Korea, reports the Korea Herald, and hire 130-150 researchers. Alan Eustace, Google senior VP for engineering, told the Korea Times that they want to recruit local computer scientists to “further develop innovative search technologies for Korean users and users around the world.”
– Google, Youtube, and Korean Connections @ GigaOm here
google’s share in the competitive search engine market in korea is only 5%. that’s pretty embarrasing for a company that’s managed to turn its name into a verb. you could never replace google in this sentence “just google it or something” with a different search engine name. all the other search engines fall into the second part of the sentence: “or something”
koreanclick reports that unique search referrals in korea are mostly by naver (appx 80%), followed by daum (48%) and yahoo!korea (32%). google’s only at 10.8%. a recent report also shows that to the question “what’s the site that first comes to your mind when you hear the term ’search engine (검색사이트 gumsek saitu)’?,” 59.4% said naver, 10.5% daum, and 7.3% yahoo. In terms of shopping sites, auction was found to be no 1 at 26.3%, followed by gmarket (18.6%), interpark (4.7%), and d&shop (4.2%). you can read the original article here (in korean). ebay bought auction in 2001, but they didn’t change the name; “ebay” is not mentioned anywhere but right on the bottom, where people wouldn’t really scroll down to see. but when i typed in “www.ebay.co.kr” i was taken to auction.
as with the global UCC boom, korean portals are pretty much in the same trend, but i’ve noticed that the korean ones have been doing that for quite a while now. and one of the most interesting things i’ve noticed about naver is that it gained popularity through its “naver knowledge search (네이버 지식검색 naver jisik gumsek).” this is a really interesting service, much like a combination of search engine + wikipedia. kind of like google (but naver had started way before google did) but much neater. korean search engines are quite different - i mentioned this after rachel’s presentation at the AoIR7.0’s doctoral colloquium as well, but if you compare how search results are displayed in yahoo (us or australia) and yahoo korea, you can clearly see the differences. yahoo!korea displays things in this categorical order:
- knowledge (users answer to other users’ questions and gain ponts, too)
- blogs and message boards
- yahoo category
- web results
- news
- hub (tag-based search)
- music
- videos
- images
- shopping
yahoo!korea basically ripped off naver’s knowledge service. well, it is in fact a really useful thing to have, and it’s helped me quite a bit every time i was preparing my trip to japan (but some people simply want to know things like “which instant noodle is hotter?”). of course i also used message boards in my daum cafes (clubs), and daum portal has recenly incorporated cafe message board search as well, which has boosted their lagging popularity. people seem to care about what other “normal people” or “netizens” have to say about thier subjects of curiousity.
anyway, back to google, as the first mentioned article says, korea’s not all that attractive in terms of market size. it’s a small country. but there are a lot of r&d centres over there, it’s pretty ridiculous - there seem to be a lot of magazine and journal articles on this topic anyway, so you can “(please insert your favourite search engine’s name here)” it, if you like - there’s ibm, microsoft, sun, hp, siemens, and google, just to name a few.
the korean government’s agenda to turn korea into the R&D Hub of North East Asia seems to have worked. why korea for r&d? here are some reasons:
- strategic location
(between two largest economies of the world, china and japan) - cultural proximity
(to other asian countries: traditional and contemporary. the korean wave phenomenon has hit the whole region and beyond, from japan to uzbekistan) - brains, or qualifications
(oecd’s report, education at a glance 2005, reports that tertiary education attainment rate of koreans between 25-34 is 47%, and the country is one of the highest performing in student performance in problem solving) - supportive environment
(the government wants you there and will offer you subsidies and tax benefits) - nice infrastructure
(transport-wise and more importantly, the broadband. if you want to see the future of broadband, or the future broadband lifestyle, go to korea) - sustainability
(labour’s still cheapter than first-world countries, and cities are becoming more livable for creative class - foreign and local alike)
it all sounds lovely and beneficial for everyone. but i’m also hearing (or reading, more like) a lot of concerned voices coming from korea. they’re saying that those r&d centres are not contributing much to developing korean r&d sector. some main reasons behind this opinion include:
- most centres function independently to the existing r&d sources in korea; in other words, there’s not much interaction between the KOREAN education and r&d sectors and the foreign-owned.
- most workers at those centres are actually koreans; it’s just the same r&d power repackaged, rather than dynamic interactions amongst different multi-national sources.
- and lastly, it appears as though korea is used as a testbed (for its techno-social and geographical advantages) and “development,” rather than “research” centre. after all, r&d includes two aspects: research and development. in the cyclical process of r&d, the egg comes first; from there chicks are “developed” into hens who can lay more super eggs later.
so i’m not quite sure what google wants from korea, other than looking at what’s going with contents and users in this exotic world built upon broadband. i hope that korea continues to shine technologically and culturally, and people - rich and poor - get to benefit from all that’s happening and is going to happen. korea will have to be careful so that they don’t get sucked into “the system” and spat out before they realise that they’ve lost most, if not all, of their eggs. my humble suggestion is that korea should watch out for their “palipali” tendencies - getting things done in a rushed/hurried manner. this charactersitic is seen in every facet of korean society, and has contributed to some amazing phenomena and developments; but after all, you can’t break the egg and pull the chick (or chicken, even) out, or sell off your farm for a quick gain before the eggs hatch (well, you can, but it’ll be a shame). can i just point out that i really hate using metaphors… well, i did it anyway just for a change.
