Looks like male Korean users, aged 25-29 have moved over from Naver to Google. Also Google's recent opening of Gmail to all users in Korea has also helped them.
KoreanClick, the domestic online consultancy, Thursday said the number of unique visitors to Google's Korean-language search site (www.google.co.kr) was 3.8 million in January, up 14.9 percent from a year before.Google has "a financial and technical edge"? Those asset analysts, so insightful!
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Around 26.6 million people used Naver's search engine in January while Daum drew a total of 21.2 million clients to its flagship e-mail offerings in the cited period.
However, Naver's year-on-year growth rate was just 3 percent and Daum even saw the number of visitors shrink 5.8 percent from 22.5 million in January 2006.
"We learned male Internet users aged between 25 and 29 moved from Naver to Google last year for some reason," a KoreanClick researcher said.
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"Although Google has struggled to make its presence felt in the local market, we have always kept a tab on the firm because it has a financial and technical edge," Mirae Asset analyst Kim Kyung-mo said.
Simple UI/UE is universal.
One thing I'd love to know is adoption of International Domain Names in Asia. Any insight on that? I think we have to wait for IE 6 to phase out before IDN really takes off. That's been the last piece of i18n that had been bugging me.
I'm wondering if people are buying up IDNs and what people's timelines are.
Sure, there will be people who will make the switch but in the end, I don't see Google taking over Korea because I believe the majority of the users in Korea are after content and Google isn't about providing media/content, at least not at the moment.