Even ‘Naver’, the absolute powerhouse of search… If it goes on like this, it will be ‘super emergency’

AI answers instead of search bar… ‘Nervous No. 1’ NAVER

NAVER’s search share fell to the 50s
AI-driven tectonic shift in the search market
The share of Naver, the absolute leader in the domestic search market, has fallen to the mid-50s. Google, armed with new services such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), seems to be gnawing away at Naver’s share. The global “search war” has begun to affect the domestic market, according to an analysis.

According to website analytics firm Internet Trends on March 23, Naver held a 55.2 percent share of the domestic search market last month. This is down 9.6 percentage points from the end of last year (64.8 percent). Google’s share jumped from 26.8 percent to 35.3 percent over the same period. The gap between the two is 19.9 percentage points. The gap has narrowed by half from 38 percentage points at the end of last year.

Google is building a new search engine that combines AI chatbots, following the launch of its AI chatbot Bard this month. The key is to transform the existing search bar from monotonous to ultra-personalized and interactive. Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, which has been ranked fourth in Korea for 10 years, is also showing its presence. OpenAI’s generative AI ‘ChatGPT’ is benefiting from being made available through Bing.

“Generative AI services that appeared in November last year are changing the rules of the domestic search engine market,” said an industry insider, “and the mood to switch to big tech search engines and try Bing and ChatGPT is gradually spreading.”
‘Tectonic shift’ in the search market… Spread of generative AI such as ChatGPT
Ask a question and get an answer in a flash…’Interactive search’ seems to be activated
Recently, NAVER’s executives have been using the word ‘crisis’. “Our existing search share is meaningless,” and “We need to relinquish the title of No. 1 in Korea and find an alternative from a blank slate,” have been heard throughout the company.

NAVER, which has been the search leader in Korea for 20 years, is nervous because the rules of the search business are changing. Not only are generative AI services such as ChatGPT proliferating, but search technology is also becoming increasingly sophisticated to keep pace with AI advancements. The era of the “Search Spring and Autumn War” has begun, and companies that fail to keep up with the pace of industry development will be left behind.
AI has become the axis of the search war
According to the information technology (IT) industry on the 23rd, the keyword that has recently shaken up the search engine market is ‘AI’. The latest trend is to identify interests based on users’ search history and show customized results accordingly. If there are 100 million users, that means 100 million search results.

Search behavior has also changed. Multi-homing, or using multiple platforms simultaneously, is becoming more common. “Each platform offers different information these days,” said an industry insider, “and there’s no reason to use only one search service when you can get it for free.”

Many users also use social media (SNS) and video platforms as search engines. According to data platform OpenSurvey, 85.4% of teens cited YouTube as the platform they used to find information in the past week. “Forty percent of Gen Zers would rather use TikTok or Instagram than Google to find a place to eat lunch,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google, adding that search engines are losing their niche.

Some analysts say that generative AI services, which emerged in November last year,토토사이트 have become increasingly influential. Generative AI saves you the trouble of filtering out useless search results. You can ask a question and get a plausible answer in a matter of seconds.

Generative AI services in search engines are still in their infancy. There’s a lot of misinformation and sometimes they don’t give the right answer. Nevertheless, the industry believes that it’s only a matter of time before the search bar becomes a dialog. Even if there are disadvantages of generative AI, the public opinion is spreading that it is better than traditional search, where it is difficult to find the desired information due to the flood of advertisement content.
○”Conflict over data will grow”
The solution that domestic companies have come up with in response to the offensive is to respond head-on. NAVER is promoting the ‘AI-based search enhancement’ project as a new survival strategy. It plans to launch ‘Search GPT’ (tentative name), a generative AI-based interactive search service, within the year. Instead of just searching, the service will provide personalized content such as images, short forms, and videos on the search screen. Kakao has organized itself. On the 15th, it separated Portal Daum into a company independent corporation (CIC). The intention is to find a breakthrough in the declining market share by forming an organizational system that can make quick and independent decisions. The company also plans to launch a generative AI chatbot for businesses within the year.

“We are considering survival strategies such as strengthening our competitiveness in search engines,” said a Kakao representative.

Companies that publish content in conjunction with search engines are also struggling to come up with alternatives. This is because the trend of consuming content through ChatGPT, etc. without entering their homepage may spread. They are raising concerns that inaccuracies in generative AI will lead to a flood of fake information. An industry insider said, “The content industry is arguing that AI companies should not be allowed to take data at will,” and predicted that “the conflict between search engines and content companies over data will intensify.”

In the IT industry, there is an argument that the government should actively support the indigenous search engine, which is a Korean asset. Only China (Baidu), Russia (Yandex), and South Korea (Naver-Next) have search engines in the world. “There’s no guarantee that we won’t follow in the footsteps of Yahoo, Lycos, and Empath,” said an industry insider, “and we desperately need a foothold for domestic search engines to survive in this turbulent time.”