Google's hard move in North East Asia

I remember reading lots of academic articles discussing the standardization vs customization of a product or service when global firms entry a foreign market. Although most of the articles I have come across focus on the traditional marketing field, this kind of notion is taking place more and more heavily in those relying the Web to survive and expand. A report from Business Week has caught my attention, the report talked about how the South Korean search engine-Naver, owned by NHN (http://www.nhncorp.com/), took over Google in the Korean market. NHN’s strategy was not too difficult to understand, targeting the key weakness of Google, which is its poor performance of looking for abundant Web documents in Korean. NHN executives made concerted efforts to create their own content and build up Naver's database with partnerships with content owners. To keep its edge, NHN blocked rivals from accessing the trove. To a great extent, such move stopped Google showing relevant results appealing to local users.

The report reminds me of the search engine atmosphere in China, where Google is having a hard time getting its China strategy to Baidu.com. The Chinese search engine owns more than 58% of China's Internet search market, compared with less than 25% for Google. The reason is simple, just like how NHN won the market in South Korea, most Chinese and Korean people do not feel that they can get more quality information in their own native language from Google. It is not surprising to see that most of my family relatives and friends use Baidu much more often.

The search engine giant has to face the reality: its dominance in northeast Asia is weak. However, Google is still trying to customize its service in order to make it more appealing to the local market. One effective way is to develop strategic alliances. Google now has a revenue-sharing partnership with Tianya, a Chinese social-networking site. In addition, big portals like SINA.com China.com all have integrated Google search into their website, so that visitors have more channels to put their search terms in Google’s search engine. Would it be successful on its way to isolate Baidu? We’ll see.

You can find the report I read on Business Week from here:

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/sep2008/gb2008095_505433.htm