Naver
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|
|
Type of site
|
Web portal |
|---|---|
| Owner | Naver Corporation |
| Website | www.naver.com |
| Alexa rank |
 56 (October 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | September 12, 1999 |
Naver (Hangul: 네이버) is a popular Web portal in South Korea, owned by Naver Corporation. Naver was launched in June 1999 by ex-Samsung employees, and it debuted as the first Web portal in Japan that used its own proprietary search engine. Among Naver's features is "Comprehensive Search", launched in 2000, which provides results from multiple categories on a single page. It has since added new services such as "Knowledge Search", launched in 2002. It also provides Internet services including a news service, an e-mail service, an academic thesis search service, and a children's portal. In 2005, Naver launched Happybean, the world's first online donation portal, which allows users to find information and make donations to over 20,000 civil society and social welfare organizations.
According to techforkorea, Naver handled 77% of all web searches in South Korea in July 2014, making it the fifth most used search engine in the world, following Google search, Yahoo!, Baidu and Bing. More than 25 million Koreans have Naver as the default browser start page. Naver launched its service in Japan in 2009, marking their first expansion out of Korea.
In 2013, Lee Hae-jin, the chairman and chief strategy of Naver, saw his stake value hover above 1 trillion won (US$939.4 million) on the back of its messenger service LINE.
The word "Naver" was derived from the word "navigate" and the suffix "-er" to mean "a sailor of the Web".
Naver was incorporated in June 1999, launching the first South Korean search portal that used an internally developed search engine. In August 2000, it launched the "Comprehensive Search" service. which allows users to get a variety of results from a search query on a single page, organized by type, including blogs, websites, images, cafes, etc. This was five years before Google launched a similar offering with its "Universal Search."
In July 2000, Naver was merged with Hangame, South Korea's first online game portal, and in 2001 changed its name to NHN, or Next Human Network. The combination of the country's top search engine and the top game portal has allowed NHN to remain South Korea's largest Internet company, with the top market capitalization among companies listed on KOSDAQ, in November 2008, NHN was transferred to the KOSPI market.
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