Naver

Naver
Type of site
 Search Engine
Owner Naver Corporation
Website www.naver.com
Commercial Yes
Registration Optional
Launched 1999 (1999)[1]

Naver (Hangul: 네이버)[2][3] is a South Korean online platform operated by Naver Corporation. It debuted in 1999 as the first web portal in Korea to develop and use its own search engine. It was also the world's first operator to introduce the comprehensive search feature, which compiles search results from various categories and presents them in a single page. Naver has since added a multitude of new services ranging from basic features such as e-mail and news to the world's first online Q&A platform Knowledge iN.

As of September 2017, the search engine handled 74.7% of all web searches in South Korea and had 42 million enrolled users. More than 25 million Koreans have Naver as the start page on their default browser and the mobile application has 28 million daily visitors. Naver is also constantly referred to as 'the Google of South Korea'.[4]

History

Naver was created in June 1999 as the first South Korean portal website with a self-developed search engine. In August 2000, Naver began the 'comprehensive search' service, which allows users to get a variety of results from a search query on a single page, organized by type, including blogs, websites, images, cafes, etc. This was five years before Google launched a similar offer with its 'universal search' function.

In the early days of Naver's operation, there was a relative dearth of webpages available in the Korean language. To fill this void, Naver became an early pioneer in user-generated content through the creation of the 'Knowledge iN (Hangul: 네이버 지식인)' service in 2002. In Knowledge iN, users can pose questions on any subject and select among answers provided by other users, awarding points to the users who gives the best answers. Knowledge iN was launched three years before Yahoo! launched its similar 'Yahoo! Answers' service,[5] and now possesses a database of over 200 million answers.

Over the years, Naver has continued to expand its services. It launched its Web comic service 'Webtoon' in 2004 and its personal Blog service in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, Naver expanded its multimedia search services, including music and video search as well as mobile search.

Junior Naver

Junior Naver (Hangul: 주니어 네이버), also known as Juniver (Hangul:쥬니버), is a portal website for children considered similar to Yahooligans. Junior Naver offers services such as avatars, educational content, quizzes, videos, Q&A, and a homework helper. Junior Naver utilizes a panel of experts and educators to filter out harmful content in order to ensure a safe internet environment for children. Ever since its competitors Daum Kids and Yahoo Kids have closed down, Junior Naver is the only children's portal site operating in Korea.

Naver Webtoon (Hangul: 네이버 웹툰) is a webcomic platform where users have free access to a variety of webtoons created by professional artists. Users can also pay publishers to view comic books and genre fiction contents online. Naver has incorporated a 'Challenge' section which allows amateurs to post and promote their own works.

Naver Cafe (Hangul: 네이버 카페) is a service that allows Naver users to create their own internet communities. There were 10.5 million cafes running as of May 2017.

Naver Blog (Hangul: 네이버 블로그) started with the name 'paper' in June 2003, and evolved to 'blog' in October 2003.[6] It had 23 million users as of April 2016.

Naver TV Cast is a web broadcast network which mainly provides web dramas distributed by Naver.

Knowledge IN

Knowledge iN (Korean:지식인), formerly Knowledge Search (Korean:지식검색), is an online Q&A platform launched in October 2002.[7] The tool allows users to ask any question and to receive answers from other users. Knowledge iN was an early example of harnessing user-generated content to expand the amount of information available on the web, particularly in the Korean language. Bradley Horowitz, former Vice President of Product Strategy at Yahoo!, has cited Knowledge iN as the inspiration for Yahoo! Answers, which was launched three years after Naver introduced the original service.[8][9]

Knowledge IN has several categories:

  • Knowledge Q&A - allows general questions about anything, and has a lot of sub-categories within itself.
    • Education, Academy
    • Computer communication
    • Games
    • Entertainment, Art
    • Life (Everyday life)
    • Health
    • Society, Politics
    • Economy
    • Travel
    • Sports, Leisure
    • Shopping
    • Local Q&A - allows people to ask for local information such as good restaurants, cheap stores, real estate, etc.
    • Agony Q&A - for people seeking advice on relationships, love, career, and sex (including an anonymous function). While other categories usually provide factual answers, Agony Q&A tends to return more opinionated responses.
    • Juniver Q&A - questions for children.
  • People - shows people who answer the most of questions in each area.
  • Best questions - shows questions that have generated the most traffic.
  • Open Dictionary - is a database of informative articles generated by users. Users can create an article alone, or they can also allow other users to contribute by creating a thread of articles on the same subject. Users can also add their own answers from Knowledge Q&A to the Open Dictionary.

Naver Dictionary supports 34 languages, including English, Korean, Chinese, Chinese characters, Japanese, Global Communication, Vietnamese, Uzbek, Indonesian, Thai, Arabic, Cambodian, Tamil, Mongolian, Hindi, Persian, Nepali, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Turkish, Georgian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech as of May 2017. Handwriting recognition is supported in Japanese and Chinese. In 2016, Naver announced that it would invest 10 billion won for the development of language dictionaries.

Naver Encyclopedia consists of a professional database with over 3 million entries from many different encyclopedias.[10] More than 1000 experts in physics, food, film, and other fields are producing 45 kinds of specialized content in the encyclopedia of Naver knowledge, and 50,000 headwords are accumulated.[10] The Naver Knowledge Encyclopedia also deals with more than 100 public institutions and has received over 900 kinds of DBs.[10]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Naver.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info - DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 2016-08-17.
  2. ↑ "나베르 – 백괴사전, 너희 모두의 백과사전". uncyclopedia.kr.
  3. ↑ "영단어 발음좀;;;ㅡㅡ^a". kin.naver.com.
  4. ↑ "Naver's new format hits newspapers". Koreatimes.co.kr. 2012-05-24. Archived from the original on 2014-03-28. Retrieved 2013-04-11.
  5. ↑ "Yahoo! Answers has app babby and calls it Answers Now". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2017-12-13.
  6. ↑ Naver service history in Naver public website
  7. ↑ "네이버 지식iN". kin.naver.com.
  8. ↑ Horowitz, Bradley (27 June 2006). "Searching for what doesn't exist…". blog.elatable.com. Retrieved 20 September 2018.
  9. ↑ Pastreich, Emanuel (18 July 2011). "Take Naver Global Today!". Korea IT Times. Retrieved 20 September 2018.
  10. 1 2 3 "[2017] Naver knowledge Encyclopedia settlement". blog.naver.com (in Korean). Retrieved 2018-04-18.

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