Naver's dominance in Korea threatened by Google with falling search rates

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Naver's dominance in Korea threatened by Google with falling search rates

Published: 18 Nov. 2024, 18:49

Naver's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi [NEWS1]

The rate of online searches via Naver in Korea has seen a significant drop over the past nine years amid growing competition, an industry report showed Monday.

The Korean portal giant took up a 57.32 percent share of the domestic search engine market in the first 10 months of this year, followed by global search engine Google at 33.9 percent, according to the report by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation.

Naver's share was more than 20 percentage points lower than the corresponding tally of 78.06 percent in 2015. At the time, Google ranked No. 3, with a mere 7.31 percent, trailing after Daum, a local internet portal currently operated by Kakao, at 11.74 percent.

The report said the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022 shifted the paradigm of the search market from offering a list of information to users' questions to providing a more customized and summarized answer.

This year, foreign search engines with AI features, including those of Google and Microsoft, showed sharp growth in the domestic market, according to the report.

In response, Naver announced its plan to apply AI technology on its search platform last week to provide more customized answers to users' queries in line with the global trend.

It has also been testing a separate generative AI search service developed last year, named "Cue:."

Yonhap