In 1994, Lee Hae Jin, a South Korean who was a founder of Naver, was bothered with the result of all the search engines in the world. As a result of all the search engines provided a lot of English data but less Korea data, he found out that it is hardly to find the information he were looking for. So he decided to build a Korea content database for Korea internet users.
At that moment, Yahoo Korea, Daum, Lycos Korea was three major portal sites in Korea. How can Naver compete with them? Lee Hae Jin's strategy was to build a platform which provided question-and-answer service. He thought that the wisdom of crowds may help Naver rapidly to collect a huge amount of data for it search engine and also accumulate enough Korea content to improve their database. For this strategy, Naver launched the service which called 「Knowledge iN」 in 2005.
As their expectation, Knowledge iN gained a great success. Knowledge search service was supported by many web users. On the other hand, by the information which users provided, Naver also became an excellent search engine service provider. Nowadays, the market share of Naver is over than 70%. Even Google Korea or Yahoo Korea roused themself to catch up Naver, this situation is still harsh. To rely on Knowledge iN rose abruptly, Naver defeated other famous search engine and won the market.
After Knowledge iN success, Yahoo Korea imitated Knowledge iN and launched Yahoo Korea Answers. Then, Yahoo Taiwan followed Korea version and launched their Answer platform in 2004. After one year later, because of Yahoo Taiwan Answer made a high grade in Taiwan, Yahoo head office sent their project team to Taiwan to gain more experience and launched American version in 2005. Knowledge search services already become another important and new style search engines to compete with traditional search engines. Nowadays, various types of Q & A platform have been creative.
Knowledge search service is a great sample to show the power of collective intelligence in this case. In moreover, I also observed that lot of enterprises just provide a platform for user, and design some interesting systems such as virtual point, rank and achievement to encourage users to contribute their intelligence. Enterprises uses these systems attract users to create and join in more internet activities in their platform. They borrow the enthusiasm of their user and reward with some titles or medals to satisfy user's vanity. To encourage their users contribute their intelligence become a new challenge for these platform.
References:
Questions in, Knowledge iN? A Study of Naver's Question Answering Community
