Google continues to face an uphill battle in Korea as search engine Empas considers defecting to arch enemy Overture, reports the Korea Times. If Empas makes the move, it would be the second Korean Internet firm this year to take its searchword ads from Google to Overture, with KTH having done so earlier this month.
Other major Korean portal sites like NHN, Daum Communications, Yahoo! Korea and MSN handle their searchword advertising with Overture.
NOTE: One wonders if all this had any bearing on Yahoo’s decision to use the term “East Sea” on its travel maps.
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Consider also the changes in Yahoo.com. Since being taken over by SBC, Yahoo has turned rogue in a sly fashion. Several drug spammers now have all of their content hosted by Yahoo or use Yahoo websites that redirect to Chinese hosted spam sites. This is not to mention the deal made with the devil (China) in helping send decent bloggers to jail for open discussion of the social problems in China. It is also embarrassing that Yahoo.com is an American company.
It seems that whenever a company resorts to raising revenue from spam-related activities, it is more a sign of financial troubles, if not moral blindness. I hope Google can avoid the worst of such.
It isn’t a big surprise that Google “suffers” here in Korea. The country is an outlier in the sense its internet users are doing different things than users elsewhere. If Google and others want to survive, they have to localize and provide different services, not to mention searches that key first and foremost to Korean content.
China a devil? Hardly…. Keep it in perspective.
RESULTS
korea VS. japan
korea 324,000,000 (view)
japan 711,000,000 (view)
Total Pages Searched: 1,035,000,000
GoogleBattle winner is japan
Clearly google is evil.
I don’t know; how many flavors does bad come in?
Here is just another example of such.
If a person did what Yahoo did (in China), then it would probably be considered a crime. If a company does such, then it seems to be good business. I still see no action being taken against Yahoo either.
Again, I hope that Google can live up to its motto: “Don’t be evil”.