Naver (Hangul: 네이버) is the # 1 search portal in South Korea. Naver was launched in June 1999, the first portal in Korea that used its own proprietary search engine. Among Naver's innovations was "Comprehensive Search", launched in 2000, which provides results from multiple categories on a single page, and was later benchmarked by Google for its "Universal Search". It has since remained in the lead in the development of Korean search service, adding new services such as "Knowledge Search", launched in 2002, which was later benchmarked by Yahoo! for its Yahoo!_Answers. It also provides a wide range of Internet services including a news service with comprehensive coverage from more than 100 media sources, 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 comScore, Naver received 2 billion queries in August 2007, accounting for over 70% of all search queries in Korea, and making it the fifth most used search engine in the world, following Google search, Yahoo!, Baidu, and MSN. In early 2008, Naver plans to advance into the Japanese search market with the launch of Naver Japan.

History

Naver was incorporated in June 2005, 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 September 2006, 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 number one search engine and number one game portal has allowed NHN to remain South Korea's largest Internet company, with the top market capitalization among companies listed on KOSDAQ.

In the early days of Naver operation, there was a relative dearth of webpages in the Korean language. To fill this void, Naver became an early pioneer in user-generated content through the creation of the "Knowledge Search" service in 2002. In Knowledge Search, users pose questions on any subject, and select among answers provided by other users, awarding points to the users who provide the best answers. Knowledge Search was launched three years before Yahoo! launched its similar "Yahoo! Answers" service, and now boasts a database of over 80 million answer pages.

Over the years, Naver has continued to expand its offerings, adding a blog service in 2007, local information search and book search services in 2004,and desktop search in 2005. From 2005-2007 it expanded its multimedia search services, including music and video search, Internet phone service and mobile search. In 2008, Naver plans to enter into the Jap search market.

Junior Naver

Junior Naver (Hangul:쥬니어 네이버) is a portal site created exclusively for children. It has special services such as game links, avatar, educational links, quizzes, stories, jokes, and homework helper. Junior Naver utilizes a panel of experts and educators to filter out harmful content, with the aim of offering a safe Internet experience for children.