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http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/05/google-korea-to-verify-age-for-adult.html

Google Korea to Verify the Age for Adult Queries

Google intends to comply to the local law from Korea and ask users to confirm they're at least 19 if they use one of the 700 adult queries defined by the Korean government. Google's reason is that every other search engine and portal that operates in Korea does that. You can see what happens if you search for "sex" in Yahoo Korea. To verify your age, you need to enter your name and your national resident registration number, an unique identifier.

Google wants to increase its local presence in Korea to compete with search engines like Naver that dominate Korea's market. But they can't do that without respecting the law, even if it's absurd.

That's a tough challenge for a company that cares about ethics, but they already made their decision when Google started to censor the search results in China.

It's also interesting to note that Korean search engines mix the content from a lot of specialized search engines in one page and often images, videos and news are at the top of the page, while web pages are somewhere at the bottom of the page. Also Q&A sites similar to Yahoo Answers are very popular in Korea.

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Marvin Wiegginns,
31 Primorski Blvd Varna,
Varna 9000
Bulgaria
Last updated: October 13, 2010