John Battelle's Searchblog

I'd be willing to place a gentleman's bet that Daum Communications is the South Korean company that bought Waltham, Mass.-based Lycos. It has been trying to find ways to expand its Web portal business beyond South Korea and, earlier this month, was in talks to buy Newcastle, Wash.-based Mail.com Corporation. So, perhaps they're going after Lycos... we shall see, as I blogged.

Cheers,
Doug

That's an interesting possibility. I did a news search on Daum and found they're doing pretty well, No. 1 in traffic, $20M in first half profit, and are opening a joint venture in Japan. They're moving their office to Cheju as well, which is kind of odd, but it certainly brings them closer to the Japanese market.

Seems like a lot of Asian sites are doing quite well. They are ranked very high in traffic according to Alexa. What kind of sites do they have DAUM? Are they trying to get into the US search market also?

Daum looks like a classic portal - news, shopping, ads (and games). Korea has some of the highest links-per-page counts, and that's mainly due to commercial content. The tolerance for commercial linking and so forth is somewhat higher, and I think they've translated that into some solid profits.

Looking at www.daum.net, it's titled "Our Internet" and the menu items across the top are: Hanmail, Cafes (I think these are like Yahoo clubs), shopping, search, news, finance, and cars. The menu below that is: kids, messenger, real estate, mobile(?), education, miznet (as in Ms., women's shopping,etc.), avatar(?), music, movies, comic/manga, fortune telling, CUVE (no idea), jobs, and games. There's a search box, headlines, etc. In short, it's not that different from the Lycos homepage circa 1999.

It's interesting that Daum is making money, but I'm not sure how well that model will travel beyond Korea, if that's their plan.

I have no idea how to post this properly, sorry.

We just added color search to ebay (or at least the sandbox). That is actually a profound addition - every instant of every day someone somewhere in the world is throwing away a colored piece of material at exactly the same time that someone somewhere else in the world is paying a lot to buy exactly the same color on the same material. As a real example, leftover cashmere yarn is woth US$30/kg as random colored scrap, $200/Kg if color searchable. There are few other areas where a search function can multiply product value 6 fold.

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