Big Data Domination
According to industry sources, Google accounts for the vast majority of the Korean big data market with Google Trends. However, local portal sites such as Naver and Daum are totally unprepared.
Google Trends shows how often a particular term is searched for, relative to the total number of global searches, and thus it is used as a major indicator that identifies users’ interests and trends. In 2007, Google employees first discovered influenza activity by analyzing search words, before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially announced flu trends. The incident led to the wide use of Google Trends. In December, Korea became one of the target countries for Google Trends, and the service is emerging as a representative model of big data in Korea and other nations.
While Google is exerting its huge influence in the local big data market, local companies are not even ready for providing their own services. In 2012, Naver released a beta version of Naver Trends. Currently, the nation’s top portal operator merely provides a service that shows the statistics of search terms on its portal site for a certain period of time, and related news, without offering any service that can be labeled as big data.
Daum also started Daum trends in 2007, but decided to end its service in October 2013. Now, it only provides a service that displays certain rankings by field on the right side of search results. It indicates that portal sites such as Naver and Daum dominate the local Internet market, but they are absolutely powerless against big data.
An industry source said, “Apparently, local portal operators’ first priority is to create various business models, without fulfilling their duty as online search engines.” The source pointed out, “Korean portal sites dominate the local market. So, it will be very meaningful if they provide their own trend services using big data technology.”