Google’s Korean woes continue

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.

This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on March 8, 2006 at 11:13 am, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. R. Elgin your flag
    Posted March 8, 2006 at 12:01 pm | Permalink

    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.

  2. MJ your flag
    Posted March 8, 2006 at 2:37 pm | Permalink

    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.

  3. thorin your flag
    Posted March 8, 2006 at 3:59 pm | Permalink

    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.

  4. R. Elgin your flag
    Posted March 9, 2006 at 8:56 am | Permalink

    China a devil? hardly…. keep it in perspective.

    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”.

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