Korea-promoting sites blocked from external search engines

Korea-promoting sites blocked from external search engines. July. 24, 2012 04:07. baltika7@donga.com sanhkim@donga.com.

Seokguram, a grotto inside the complex of the Korean Buddhist temple Bulguk, is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul was the royal palace of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910).

To promote these Korean cultural relics to the world, the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea opened an English-language website. Yet foreign users have no means to find the site.

The Internet should be a good source to find information on the palace or the grotto, but the contents of the administration’s website cannot be searched by major search engines such as Google or Yahoo! Instead, Wikipedia and other personal websites top the list of search results.

The reason is simple. The culture body has blocked access for the search engines. This is not an isolated case. In Korea, search engines popular among foreigners are often blocked from accessing materials targeted to them.

○ Gear toward foreigners yet hide from them

To the shame of a country considered an Internet powerhouse, The Dong-A Ilbo found that countless data on Korea for foreigners online was “hidden” from the world. Such cases were varied, ranging from English-language websites of the Korean government to Korean Wave superstars to exporting companies.

Typing “Big Bang” in a search box fails to bring up the official website of the Korean boy band because access by foreign search engines is blocked just as the case of the website of the culture body. Entering the group’s album title, "Big Bang Discography," in the search box is also of no help in finding their official site. Instead of the information made by the group’s company, materials created by their fans show up.

The same is true for the website “Who Are You” of E-Land Group, a Korean fashion retailer. This site was designed to help the company advance into the U.S. market but is now under renewal.

○ Why searches are blocked

Sookmyung Women’s University’s Web R&D Center is a think tank that studies technologies and systems that facilitate exchange of information on the Web. A recent study by the institute on the Web accessibility of 43 Korean government sites showed that 14 of them were cut off from access by external search engines.

Moon Hyeong-nam, a professor at the think tank, said, “Certain domestic websites seem to have been cut from access by foreign search engines out of fear of possible leakage of personal data, which happened in the past due to lack of management capability. But if information meant to be published is also blocked, there’s no point because it will be useless.”