Empas

» see empas.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i was on Google from about 2001 and never had a reason to type anything into a Korean search box. Empas is in here for an argument it picked in 2005, which is one of the better fights anybody has had about what a search engine is allowed to look at, and it happens to have been settled a long way from where i was sitting.

The company behind it was Knowledge Plant, set up in Seoul in September 1996, and empas.com went live on 1 December 1999. The differentiator was natural language search. You were supposed to be able to ask it a question in an ordinary Korean sentence instead of assembling keywords the way the rest of the industry expected. English-language sources sometimes date the launch to 1998 and the Korean ones to 1999, which is the usual gap between a company existing and a product shipping.

It worked well enough that Empas held second place among Korean portals by unique page views across 2000 and 2001. Then Naver launched Knowledge iN in 2002 and the ground moved. Naver's answer to search was to get Koreans to write the answers themselves, inside Naver, and by the middle of the decade it was taking over seventy percent of the country's queries. It owned the corpus rather than merely indexing one.

~ the case file ~

~ the fight it picked ~

Empas responded in 2005 with Open Search. If Naver's whole value was locked-up user-generated content, then Empas would index it anyway and let you search across every portal at once from a single box. The blog version launched that November and reached something like 1.6 million blogs spread across twenty-five separate services. For anyone actually looking for something, this was straightforwardly better than any one portal's own search.

It also ignored robots.txt, which is why NHN went after it. The Korean press had fun with the naming, setting yeollin geomsaek, open search, against yamche geomsaek, roughly freeloader search. Naver won the litigation, and separately restructured the URLs of Knowledge iN so the crawler could no longer follow them. The underlying argument Empas was making, that a walled garden of user posts should not be exempt from being searched, is one the industry is still having twenty years later with different companies in the seats.

~ how it actually ended ~

SK Communications bought Empas on 19 October 2006. SK already ran Nate, a portal that had never managed to break the Naver and Daum pairing, and the plan was to graft Empas's search onto Nate's traffic. The two companies merged in December 2007, with the Empas name staying on the corporate entity for a while after that.

The number that makes the ending readable comes from November 2008. Nate and Empas between them drew about 37 million visitors that month against Naver's 31 million, and SK closed Empas anyway. Visitors were never the problem. Search share was, and two portals splitting an audience while losing nearly every actual query to Naver was worth less than one portal with a single front door. Empas stopped serving on 28 February 2009 and redirected to Nate from 1 March.

It was the last Korean search company outside the two big portals to make a serious run at Naver, and nothing since has come close. The mechanism it lost to, owning the content instead of indexing it, turned out to be the one that decided search almost everywhere else too.

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