KoreaCrunch

Now Naver accounts for 70 percent of Korean search engine traffic, it has become more or less invincible among portal sites. Still, the rivals are trying to regain lost ground, tiny though their ships may look against the Death Star of NHN. It has been a month since Empas (www.empas.com) quietly launched an open search service, a kind of search of the searches, allowing users to look for information from other portal sites like Daum, Yahoo Korea - and Naver.

Data from online researchers Matrix show that the number of visitors to Empas increased by 17.7 percent three weeks after it launched the open search in the last week of May. Naver has since changed its address system; not, the company protests, to block Empas’ open search from searching NHN: that has merely been the accidental result of “internal system maintenance.”

Other portal companies did not object to Empas’ new service. Yahoo said that although its contents were also “stolen,” it did not intend to make an issue out of it since it was after all users who create content and the company cannot claim exclusive rights over them. Other portal sites, including Dreamwiz, are secretly siding with Empas, saying they agree with the spirit and value of the open search, even if the method is problematic. The reason, it appears, is that the number of visitors to their websites has grown. Thus since the open search emerged, traffic at Yahoo’s search engine has increased by 18.8 percent, because if users open a site the open search has found on Yahoo, they go through the Yahoo link.

Daum, once the No. 1 portal site, has drawn its light saber. In collaboration with music site Muz (www.muz.co.kr), Daum started on June 16 a free music search service that allows users to look up and listen to 400,000 songs by typing the name of singers and song titles.

Yahoo Korea plans to assault Naver with multimedia and personalized search services. It has promised a video search where users can look up files for Windows Media, Apple’s Quicktime and Real Media players, saying today’s Internet users search mostly for multimedia files. Its U.S. parent has also launched a desktop search since it believes people consider documents and e-mails on their own computers the most important and look them up frequently, and Yahoo Korea is to follow suit in the second half of the year.

The war of the portals is likely to heat up as rivals feel NHN’s dominance could threaten their very survival. “We have mobilized all our strength because we believe there will be no future if we are pushed back any further,” Empas vice president Park Tae-woong said.