First off, there are no major changes for the market shares of the main players in the Korean search engine market.However, there seem to be some interesting developments for the smaller players in both desktop and mobile searches.

According to Nielsen KoreanClick it seems that the mobile market share is mainly dominated by Naver (70%) and Daum (13%). However, Google seems to catch up pretty fast and has a much bigger mobile market share of 11% compared to its weaker performance for desktop searches, where it has a mere 2% of the market share.

KoreanClick also reported that the number of unique mobile visitors for Google is not far off the two main players.

Regarding desktop searches, there seems to be a small movement for the positions four and five as Zum has overtaken Nate for the first time in numbers of unique searches. In December 2013 it recorded 46,217,797 unique searches compared to just 40,989,188 unique searches on Nate in the same period.

Zum.com is a web portal site, which started its services two years ago and had always been the smallest player among Naver, Daum and Nate. However, it has experienced slow but consistent growth over the past year and is currently maintaining a negligible market share of a little over 1%.

At the current speed it shouldn’t pose a threat to the biggest two players any time soon, but it is working hard to distinguish itself from the other platforms. For example, the platform introduced its own web browser called ‘Swing’, which claims to be the fastest browser in Korea and is specifically adapted to the heavily flash-using Korean online environment.