KoreaCrunch provided some nice stats to the search market on their website and I wasn’t surprised of the results. Google didn’t fair well with the local competition, at the time the stats were produced. I think it will be a long road for Google to reach the top three and something to take notice, MSN isn’t on top five. Compared to US sites, according to Alexa.com, Yahoo! ranks 1st in traffic, 2nd is Google and 3rd is MSN.

Why isn’t Google ranked in the top 3 in market share? Is it because the site is too simple? As odd as it may sound, it may be one of the problems lacking interest from the users. My girlfriend loves using Daum as her first search engine and Naver would be the next option because the site looks good and has a lot of information on the main page. No matter how much Google spends in marketing, I don’t think they will make much of a dent in the Korean market, but do they really need to?!

It seems everyone is playing search engine catch-up in Korea, I know MSN Korea was/is seeking someone to manage their MSN portal. They must know where they stand in the Korean search market.