The local search engines still dominate the entire South Korea’s Internet market. One of the main search engines in South Korea Naver, formed by NHN in year 1999 continued to play an important role in changing the search behavior of many Korean. Naver, whose name derived from the neighbor and navigator words has the existing 16 million of Korean using its search engine everyday, accounted for 71.08% of South Korea searches in last June. It is not surprise that a search engine that “made in Korea” is leading the search engine race in South Korea, followed by another Korean company Daum.net with 12.05%, Yahoo! South Korea with 5.92% and Google with 1.95%, according to this article. Moreover, the community site of Naver, i.e. Naver Cafe has achieved extraordinary growth, with an increased of 3 million users over the past twelve months, and thus overtook its closest rival Daum.net in the number of visitors to their community services.

It is clearly that both Naver and Daum.net are positioning themselves as portal by choosing the complexity of their user interfaces. Nevertheless, we witness the rise and fall of Yahoo! and Google South Korea, both dropped their market share to less than 10% in South Korea while a year ago, they achieved 32% and 17% market share respectively.