Korea's top newspaper criticizes Naver for being too commercial
Web 2.0 | 2007/10/19 23:48 | Web 2.0 Asia
Chosun Ilbo, Korea's top newspaper, wrote a piece on Naver today criticizing the service for being too commercialized.
The article gives querying "Chinese" as an example, where a whopping 90+% of the search results are of commercial nature. While Google makes a rather clear distinction between search results and ads, Naver doesn't provide clear visual cues on ads, the article claims. Entering "Chinese" on Naver actually gives a full page load of ads, but these ads are guised as normal web search results as they appear under rather ambiguous names such as "Power Links" and "Plus Pro". I call this strategy shrewd but evil.
The article gives querying "Chinese" as an example, where a whopping 90+% of the search results are of commercial nature. While Google makes a rather clear distinction between search results and ads, Naver doesn't provide clear visual cues on ads, the article claims. Entering "Chinese" on Naver actually gives a full page load of ads, but these ads are guised as normal web search results as they appear under rather ambiguous names such as "Power Links" and "Plus Pro". I call this strategy shrewd but evil.
