Google and Globalization, II

The Economist has a new article on Google's success, or lack thereof, in Asia.  It manages to get several points right, but in the end it fails to offer a complete and coherent explanation for why Naver does so well in the Korean search market and why Google does so poorly. I have commented on this matter before, in a post on Google and Globalization in Korea , and an earlier post on "Why Google Must Succeed in Korea, for Korea's Benefit."

As the Economist article describes, part of the problem for Google in South Korea has to do with language and culture.   In other words, Google may be able to improve upon its Korean language presentation and could make its services more appealing to Koreans, culturally speaking.   However, this skirts around the main issue.

• Google is a search technology that uses robots in an effort to identify and classify all of the information on the internet, whatever the language.


• Naver, on the other hand, does not search the internet.  It is a Korean-language database, created for Koreans, to help them collectively answer questions, which explains why "Knowledge-In" is the most popular service.

So, trying to make a one-on-one comparison of Google with Naver really is comparing apples and oranges.  As I have argued in earlier posts, the popularity of Naver, or the lack of success for Google, whichever way you put it, says volumes about the information culture in South Korea.  Use of Google for search is indeed one reasonable measure of globalization here.

Google and Globalization in Korea

The following is a letter to the editor that I wrote, published in the Joongang Ilbo

The Internet itself epitomizes globalization, and there is no more prominent indication of this than Google’s success. 

Because the Internet unleashes a flood of information, its users around the world now turn to Google to tame that flood and find the information they need. People in virtually every country of the world now “Google it” to find press coverage, images, videos and more. 
Nevertheless, there are four nations in the world in which success seems to elude Google. The Financial Times, in an article accompanied by a map of the non-Google World, reported that Google has failed to achieve success in South Korea, China, Russia and the Czech Republic. 
Here in Korea, the major media have made much of how Naver leads the search market and has so far beaten Google. 

However, this claim, like that on behalf of Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China and Seznam in the Czech Republic, is sheer nonsense. If you believe the apples and oranges comparison of these four search services with Google, I have a bridge to sell you.

In fact, the services all have two critical limitations. First, they answer search inquiries ONLY in Korean, Russian, Chinese, or Czech, respectively. Second, they do not search or “crawl” the entire Internet, instead focusing only on content in Russian, Chinese, Korean or Czech. Contrast this with Google’s stated mission, “… to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” 

A closer look at Naver’s success and the difficulties for Google here actually explains why Google must ultimately succeed in the Korean market. Part of Naver’s success is simply because Koreans feel more comfortable with a service presented entirely in the Korean language. 
Despite the national campaign here to learn English, it is well documented that people here feel uncomfortable with situations that demand English, such as job interviews, meeting foreigners and surfing English Web sites. 

Naver also responds to a strong cultural need felt by many Koreans to know what other people are thinking. Hence, its most popular service is called “Knowledge-In.” Users submit questions which other Naver users are encouraged to answer, creating an ever increasing base of “knowledge.” 

The crucial limitation is that Naver’s database, because it is a Korean language-only service, effectively excludes most of the world’s knowledge. 
In this respect, one can argue that Naver is more of a social-networking site than a search engine. Google, of course, allows searching in Korean as well as English and returns Web pages in both languages. 

Naver also relies heavily on “sponsored” searches, a model pioneered by Overture and Yahoo. With this business model, any company, organization or individual can pay to have its search results appear higher in the list of results from any search inquiry. 

Search results in Naver contain several categories of sponsored search. Consequently, commercial entities with the money to pay for Web-based promotion, dominate in Naver search results. So why must Google succeed in the South Korean market? 

The answer is because the flood of information that is available electronically and digitally via the Internet is multilingual. Although English may be the dominant language of international business today, other languages are important. Google’s robots search, or attempt to search, this entire universe of information on the Internet, whatever the language. 
This explains Google’s interest in automated translation from one language to another and why its translation service now represents the best available machine translation. 

Whatever Google’s weaknesses, its global scope and goals are surely its strength. 
Take a specific example from the field of education and study abroad, currently a booming business here. If a Korean parent or student does a search on Naver for “study abroad in the U.S.”, they will typically receive a page of search results that are sponsored by the dominant commercial study-abroad institutes in South Korea. 
While those results may serve the promotional needs of private institutes, they may not fit the needs of the individual student or family. 
They also may fail to contain the most current information placed on the Internet by the U.S. schools, colleges and universities themselves. 
For such information - you guessed it - we advise parents and students to “Google it.”

For Korea to fully participate in the global information society, a higher portion of its students, teachers, government officials and business personnel will need to more effectively find and utilize the information available through the Internet.
As things stand, this means embracing Google or a service like it, rather than simply enjoying the Korean-language province of the Web, which is now dominated by Naver. 
South Korea has embraced the notion that English fluency is one key to its future role in the global information society. 
The nation might do well to also monitor use of Google as an important index of globalization here.

South Korea Ranks 3rd Among OECD Countries in "Readiness for Globalization"

Ready for Globalization?  Global Benchmark Report 2008 is the fourth in a series of reports giving the Danish Confederation of Industry's annual assessment of the development in the business environment and the performance of the individual OECD member countries.  I must admit that I was somewhat surprised that South Korea, overall, ranked third among the countries studied.  The report includes 84 international benchmarks and provides a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the OECD countries in the global economy.   On balance it is quite a laudable accomplishment for The Republic of Korea and a closer look at the report is quite revealing.  The report compares the performances of 29 OECD countries and their business environments.

The comparison is based on 84 indicators divided into six main sections as indicated in the accompanying graphic (click to see a full-size version of the graphic).  Across all of the benchmarks, South Korea had more top-3 rankings than all other countries, except for Switzerland and Iceland.  This is shown in the second graphic to the left.  One can read through the entire report to get a sense of where Korea ranked high and where it was low.   It ranked high on measures of growth and development, but low, for example on labour productivity.  Korea came out number one among the 29 countries in the benchmark of knowledge and competence, based on average rankings using 23 separate indicators. This is shown in the third accompanying graphic.   As the report explains, The strengths of South Korea include a large share of youth completing a secondary degree, a large share of students in science and engineering and a high patent productivity.  One interesting measure shows that South Korea led all OECD countries in the share of 25-34 year olds with an upper secondary education as of 2005.  It ranked number three in the share of 25-34 year olds with a tertiary education.

And, it ranked second to the United States in terms of expenditure on educational institutions as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.  Notably, South Korea ranked in the bottom five in terms of Labor Regulations as of 2007.  The assumption of the report being that a low degree of labor regulation helps business adapt to changes.  Not surprisingly, it ranked at or near the top in measures of broadband and internet use.  Finally, it is of interest to note that South Korea ranked last on the measure of "Cultural Openness" as shown in the final graphic below, and next-to-last on a measure of "Discrimination Towards Race, Gender, Etc." in 2007.   There is much more in the full report, which can be downloaded as a pdf file using the link at the start of this post.