The Marmot’s Hole

Jun

At least a Korean politician agrees. I agree that these portals can do something like Adwords. I couldn’t get the article URL, but here’s the Korea Times article in entirety:

A lawmaker is seeking to establish legislation requiring the country’s major Internet portal sites to introduce simple Web search services similar to Google.

Rep. Chin Soo-hee of the main opposition Grand National Party said Sunday that she will propose a bill later this month to increase the relevance of Internet query results.

“Local portals put a lot of edited content including advertisements into search results, showing them in categorized section. I think this distorts the objectivity of the services,” Chin said.

“Internet users must be able to search for anything without being disrupted by advertisements or artificial classification,” the first-term assemblywoman said.

Chin thinks of prompting portals to provide search services in two fashions _ a conventional system and a simple new way of showing results without ads or categorization _ thus enabling Web surfers to choose between the two.

“The new search solution should return query results without any editing, through excluding keyword ads and artificial classification,” Chin said.

“That was the original goal of search services _ bringing relevant search results in a fraction of a second _ and people reaped the rewards,” she said.

Chin added she hopes the National Assembly will pass the bill in an extended session in June or August.

“The policy will benefit our portal sites in the long run since they should prepare for foreign behemoths like Google, which is armed with a very simple search platform to compete with Korean players,” Chin said.

Google is the world’s foremost search engine, which boasts a simple search interface.

In response, Web portals flatly opposed the idea.

“Korean portal sites have raised competitive edges by creating unique search technologies and Chin is negating such efforts,” said an official at an online company.

“The policy will harm the competitiveness of our portal sites rather than helping it. Even Google’s search results demonstrate keyword ads. Chin should wake up,” said the official, who declined to be named.

If enacted, the introduction of a new search system is projected to make a dent into the country’s lucrative market for keyword ads, or online promotions for selling ads related to query keywords.

After signing up keyword ad contracts, Internet portals produce query results in a way favorable to the advertisers. The market was just 40 billion won in 2002 but the figure rocketed to 320 billion won in 2005 and 550 billion won last year.