It’s easy to conclude that Google (News - Alert) is well on its way to ruling the world, having already taken over the search market and caused formerly popular search engines to fall out of favor. Yahoo is swiftly losing ground in the global market to rival Google and, more recently, Facebook (News - Alert).

Now, another example of these losses has become apparent with the announcement of the closing of Yahoo Korea at the end of 2012. Early in 2013, the site will be redirected to an English website. Once among the most popular search engines, Yahoo is no longer considered a top contender. Not only has it had Google and Bing to deal with, but it also had various global search engines developed in other countries and preferred by the Internet users in those countries encroaching on its market share around the world. In Korea, this has certainly been the case.


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 A spokesman from Yahoo Korea says, “The Korean operation has been faced with a lot of challenges and has slowed Yahoo’s overall business growth for the past few years. It has been fighting an uphill battle against local web portals such as NHN Corp’s Naver and Daum Communications which account for the vast majority of search traffic in South Korea.”

This has proven to be true when one looks at growth in the South Korean market share. Local internet portal companies, Naver and Daum, account for a combined 86 percent of the market, thus, leaving Yahoo Korea far behind with only 1.5 percent of the market share.

Whether or not Yahoo will start to pull out around the world and focus on their North American search engine in order to better compete with Google and Bing, or if they will, eventually, subsist on their various holdings and get out of the search market altogether is still yet to be seen.