By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The South Korean Internet market is ruled by a big, green giant called Naver (www.naver.com), and Daum (www.daum.net) has been the most visible among its undersized rivals.
However, the Naver-Daum duopoly is about to face its biggest challenge yet, with a new and improved Nate (www.nate.com) determined to prove that three can play.
SK Communications, the operator of Nate and the Cyworld (www.cyworld.com) social networking service, has been interweaving the two Web services in phases over the past few months in an attempt to boost Nate's search traffic.
The company declared the process completed on Tuesday as it unveiled Nate's new "connected" main page. The debut of the new Nate doubled as the retirement of Cyworld's main page, as users of the social networking service can now only access their personal Web pages through Nate.
It is clear where the spears are being pointed. SK Communications chief executive Joo Hyung-chul has been saying that Daum's No. 2 spot should be Nate's by the year's end, and it remains to be seen whether his revamped Web portal will be up to the task.
"The combining of the main pages of Nate and Cyworld will make Nate Connect more convenient and open it to a wider range of Web services to improve its competitiveness," Joo was quoted as saying.
"Our open Web policy and semantic search services will trigger new innovation in the stagnant Web portal market."
SK Communications is desperate to get more search revenue from Nate, but breaking through a local search market that is 70 percent controlled by Naver is proving to be difficult, especially when Daum is gobbling the biggest scraps off the table.
An obvious solution was to take advantage of the company's biggest asset, the immensely popular Cyworld, which has more than 23 million subscribers, and use it to make Nate more relevant.
In a country where Internet users have grown accustomed to ubiquitous blogs and question-and-answer type search services, user-generated content plays a key role in search competition, and SK Communications would like to believe it has an advantage in this aspect.
About 17 million Cyworld users are also customers to Nate's Web services, which include e-mail, blogs, online communities and instant messaging, SK Communications officials said.
The new Nate is designed as a one-stop destination for the usual portal services, such as search, news and e-mail, and also the Cyworld personal pages, online communities and blogs.
Another distinctive feature is Nate Connect, which enables users to access up to 100 Web services provided by other companies through links on the Nate main page and the Nate-On instant messaging service.
Nate is planning to increase the number of partner Web sites, including more social networking and blogging services, and allow users to monitor the content through RSS updates.
SK Communications has also been constantly upgrading Nate's search services. Nate is now providing "semantic" search, a technology that seeks to improve search relevance by better analyzing user intentions in search queries and turn the information from search results to something with a more clearly defined meaning.
"Only Cyworld users have been receiving updates about new postings of other Cyworld users, but we plan to expand the update services to blogs, online communities and also the Web services of other companies. We believe providing a more open Web environment will benefit users and also give Nate a distinctive strength," said a SK Communications spokesman.