The new version of Nate (www.nate.com) represents an important start for the Web portal’s efforts to compete with the more popular sites Naver (www.naver.com) and Daum (www.daum.net). / Korea Times |
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
SK Communications has struggled to shake the tag of the Internet industry's biggest underachiever. It remains to be seen whether the company's facelift to its flagship site, Nate (www.nate.com), will prove a good first effort.
The new Nate unveiled a slick interface and a Swiss army knife approach to Web services in its debut last week, with a focus on integrating multimedia, local and other content from partner sites to enrich its search results.
``The competition in search is becoming less about the size of the database and editing skills and more about technology, and we believe our new service represents an advancement in Web search,'' an SK Communications official said.
``The new service isn't perfect, as we would call it a `new trial,' but as with any new Web search services, things will get better over time, and the feedback from users will play a part in the improvements. We are especially confident about our multimedia search services that allow us to distinguish ourselves further from rival sites.''
SK Communications developed an impressive lineup of Internet services in past years, but combined, they never managed to deliver the company something bigger than the sum of their parts.
Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) remains as the country's most popular social networking site with 23 million-plus subscribers, and Nate-On continues to thump MSN Messenger as the top instant messaging service. The acquiring of Empas in 2006 also gave SK Communications an impressive weapon in the ongoing search wars.
However, none of this mattered in the area that matters most ― search function, as Nate continued to struggle to compete in a market where the green giant called Naver (www.naver.com), boasting a 75-percent share of all search queries, dominates. The biggest chunks off the table always fell to Daum (www.daum.net), the perennial search runner-up, leaving Nate a distant third.
It became increasingly apparent that Nate wouldn't make any noise without leveraging the brilliance of Cyworld, Nate-On and Empas. SK Communications' solution was to toss them all in a blender that is the new Nate.
Nate 2.0 has absorbed Empas, which went defunct March 1, inheriting its former partner site's search prowess.
Nate also provides Cyworld content in its search results and uses Nate-On to enable a real-time, question-and-answer-type search service that it hopes will improve the user experience.
It would be a stretch to declare any of Nate's new features as groundbreaking, with none of them truly managing to escape a ``more of the same'' feeling. And the decision to enforce all Nate subscribers to use their real names when posting articles is already inviting a backlash from Internet users who claim that the new restrictions could limit online expression.
Nevertheless, the revamped site represents an important start for Nate's efforts to challenge the Naver-Daum search duopoly. The massive user-generated content of Cyworld, apparently the company's most treasured asset, just might give Nate a puncher's chance in search, said Joo Hyeong-cheol, chief executive of SK Communications, in a statement.
``The new Nate offers advanced multimedia search functions and will also provide a platform to experience new services such as semantic search,'' he added.
Joo said the company also plans to release a mobile version of the renewed Nate, thus opening new opportunities to create synergies with its parent company, SK Telecom, the country's biggest mobile telephony operator.
The most impressive feature of the new Nate seems to be the improved relevancy in video and audio search results. For example, when typing in ``Kim Yu-na'' in the search bar, the search results will show video clips of the figure-skating prodigy's latest performances at international events and also a list of music used in them.
Nate's image search boasts a bulked-up database by accessing the millions of photos that Cyworld subscribers chose to leave unprotected, and also allows users to search images by color and subject, as in faces or objects.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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