By Guest Author Bonjung Gooon on her Open SEO blog.

Daum takes a unique position in the Korean search engine market.

(1) Naver    (2) Daum     (3) Google Korea & Yahoo! Korea

When you just take account of search engine market share of Daum, you may underestimate it. In Korea’s search engine market, Naver shares 74.47% and Daum shares 14.47%. (Yahoo! Korea and Google Korea shares only 4.04% and 1.53% each.) But the value of Daum can not be measured just by its size. When it comes to devotion of its site’s members, Naver’s can’t overcome Daum’s.

What makes Daum so unique in Korea?

Daum launched it as e-mail service site in 1995. Now it has become the No.2 portal site which provides various services like search engine, community, blog and more. Community and blog works similar to Naver’s(See my other post explaining how Naver works). But there are extra-special characters of Daum.

Daum’s searceh engine results page seems similar to Naver’s. (It contains all kind if information such as organic search result, PPC, community, blog, news, images and so on.) But Daum’s organic search result and PPC result come from Google’s. (Naver’s comes from Yahoo!’s)

Agora:

Agora is one of verticals which Daum has opinion power. Agora originally means ‘an open “place of assembly” in ancient Greek city-states.’. As its meaning, Agora plays main role to be place for web users to share their thoughts and opinion ranging from politics to culture. When there are issues, people can discuss it and sometime try to sign and support petitions. The trends of public opinion can be made and seen in this place. And actually it leads to offline result. (in good ways or bad ways.)

BloggerNews:

While Naver blog services mainly consist of Naver blogs, Daum more tends to open for other domain’s blogs. (In fact, Naver seems to be more closed and narrow) BloggerNews introduces lots of useful blogs. Korean bloggers love it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Global, Guest Authors, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.