Daum, Korea's #2 portal site, said they added "wine search" feature to their search service. As the name suggests, it's the search service specifically tuned for finding the right information about wine.
Why wine search? According to Daum, the frequency of querying "wine" increased by 25% over the last month. Presumably, this has to do with the surging popularity of a Korean version of Japanese comic book, titled "The Divine Water".
To index more accurate and up-to-date information about wine, Daum partnered with wine companies. And Daum also said they will add other "topic-specific search" features, based on societal trends, in the future.
We gotta look at the big picture - what's notable here is not the wine search per se, but the fact that a major Korean portal has analyzed the search trend, sensed the "zeitgeist", and added a specific value-add feature on top of their generic search service in order to better address the zeitgeist.
Maybe this can be another "only in Korea" thing - a country where everyone is interested in what everone else is interested in.
Or this might be the future of search - build search around people's interest; withdraw the knowledge/information/know-how that's contained in people's brains but hasn't yet been expressed in the form of web pages.
