NAVER Japan

» see naver.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

NAVER opened in Korea in 1997 and its Tokyo arm began running a Japanese version in April 2001. The pitch was one query across everything: web pages, video, images and audio returned together, with the multimedia half matched by file extension, which in 2001 meant asking for .asf or .rm and getting back whatever had been crawled. Two human editors, whom the company called surfers, kept the directory by hand and pulled illegal files out of it. By the middle of 2002 the Japanese site was serving two million page views a day off an index of about a hundred million domestic pages that got recrawled every two or three days, and the engine was licensed out to Panasonic's hi-ho as well.

It closed on 31 January 2005, announced three weeks earlier, and the browser toolbar went with it. NAVER's explanation in 2005 was that it wanted its people on a new community service, which turned out to be CURURU. The portal around the search outlasted it by seven months and stopped on 31 August. Years later Akira Morikawa, who ran the Japanese company, described the whole exit differently: a temporary withdrawal so the Korean parent could concentrate on winning Korea.

Japan is the one large market where Google never simply took the front door, and both NAVER attempts were aimed squarely at the gap that left open. That condition held nowhere else, which is why a Korean company putting two complete product teams into Japanese search, eight years apart, has no counterpart to measure it against.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ coming back in 2009 ~

A second company with the same name was incorporated on 30 November 2007, capital of fifty million yen, wholly owned by NHN Japan, Morikawa as its representative, and the press release noted that the new engine had already been built in Korea and was in testing. A data-analysis office opened in Dalian the following month and another in Hakata, Fukuoka on 5 January 2009. The closed beta started at noon on 15 June 2009 for about five thousand people who had signed up for it, and the open beta followed on 1 July with roughly a hundred and twenty staff behind it.

The concept had a name that does not survive translation intact, something like searching for one another. In practice it meant four things bolted around a conventional index: NAVER Matome, where users assembled links and pictures into topic pages; Smart Finder, a faceted search with no keyword box, where you picked attributes and got matches; Theme Search, running on a database NAVER built out of Wikipedia and content partners; and a review search that crawled message boards and question sites. Morikawa's stated medium-term goal was third place in Japanese search. From 1 September 2010 the engine also quietly started answering livedoor's search box.

~ the two hundred thousand ~

Nielsen measured it that December and the numbers are the whole story in one table. NAVER Japan drew 1,342,000 monthly visitors, up from a little over two hundred thousand in July. NAVER Matome went from a hundred thousand in July to 847,000 in December. The search results screen stayed at roughly two hundred thousand across the same six months, and Nielsen said so in as many words: the chances of it being used as an ordinary search engine were not increasing.

The other figure in that survey settles where the growth came from. More than seventy percent of the traffic arriving at NAVER Matome came in from searches on Google and Yahoo!. The thing that was growing was not NAVER's search engine, it was a set of pages that NAVER's competitors were delivering readers to.

~ what the brand did next ~

The pruning came in waves. Ten NAVER services were announced for closure on 13 March 2013 and gone by the end of April; N Drive and NAVER Photo Album ended with November. Then on 22 November LINE published a one-page schedule. Search on desktop, mobile, smartphone browser and the iPhone and Android apps, covering web, image, blog, review, news and shopping results. Three dictionary apps, one of them Korean. A phrasebook for the iPhone. Against every line, the same date: 18 December 2013. The engine sold to outside partners was to be wound down progressively, with no date given at all.

LINE's own wording was that the NAVER brand in Japan would be consolidated into Matome, with management resources reallocated to LINE and to Matome. The company that signed the notice was LINE Corporation, which had been called NHN Japan until the first of April that year and was the same legal person that closed the search engine in 2005. Matome, the part that worked, ran until 30 September 2020.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »