Daum Search Engine: Korea's Other Own Index

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 27 October 2026

What Daum is, and where its results come from

Daum is South Korea's second-oldest major web portal, founded in 1995, and for most of the 2000s and early 2010s it was the country's second search engine behind Naver. Like Naver, it is a portal first: mail (Hanmail), community forums (Daum Cafe), news, and the Tistory blogging platform, with search as one service among them. As of 27 October 2026 daum.net is live and operated by Daum Corporation, a subsidiary of the Korean AI company Upstage.

Daum's verdict on this site is own index: it answers Korean web searches from its own crawler and its own index (the engine's stored copy of the web, built by its own software), not from a licensed Google or Bing feed. No evidence has been found that its organic results are resold from anyone. That makes Daum one of very few independent web indexes anywhere.

The correction most readers need is about direction. Daum's decline is a decline in usage, not a change of index supplier. It went from roughly one Korean search in five to roughly one in thirty-four, and it has changed hands twice since 2025.

How Daum gets its results, and how strong the evidence is

The evidence for Daum's own index is solid but secondary, and it is weaker than the evidence available for Naver. In order of strength:

Daum licensed its engine to a rival. In January 2014 Aju Business Daily reported that Daum was negotiating with SK Communications to apply "its search engine" to the Nate portal. An engine that can be licensed to another portal is an engine with its own index.
Daum's results were a distinct tier in a 2011 joint deal. When Daum and Nate agreed in April 2011 to show identical results, Korea JoongAng Daily reported the page would show "Overture's results in the first tier, Daum's in the second, and Nate's in the third." The first tier was paid listings from Overture, Yahoo's ad network. The organic results were Daum's own.
Daum runs a webmaster platform, Daum Webmaster Tools, where site owners verify ownership by placing a PIN code in their robots.txt file. Only an engine that crawls for itself needs such a tool. This is documented in a 2021 Korean how-to post; the tool's own pages were not checked for this profile.
The crawler is commonly logged under the user-agent name Daumoa, with variants. Bot directories list it, but no first-party Daum documentation of the crawler was located, so the name is reported rather than confirmed.

Results pages follow the Korean portal convention: typed blocks of Cafe posts, blogs, news and web documents rather than a single ranked list of links. Whether Daum's search advertising is currently supplied by a third party, as Overture's was in 2011, is unconfirmed.

Market share: from one in five to under three percent

Korean search share is measured differently by different services, and the figures below come from two Korean panels and from StatCounter. They do not agree with one another, and they should not be averaged.

Daum's share of South Korean search, by period and source
Period	Daum	Naver	Google	Bing	Measure
March 2011	20%	69.8%	-	-	Korean Click, visits
December 2013	20%	74.4%	2.8%	-	Nielsen Korean Click, PC queries
July 2024	3.40%	55.58%	36.24%	3.55%	InternetTrend, monthly average
2024	3.72%	58.14%	-	2.91%	InternetTrend, annual average
2025	2.94%	62.86%	29.55%	3.12%	InternetTrend, annual average
September 2026	0.73%	43.06%	47.97%	4.83%	StatCounter, all platforms

Three facts stand out. Daum fell from about 20% in 2011 and 2013 to 2.94% as an annual average in 2025. In July 2024 Bing passed Daum for third place in InternetTrend's data for the first time. And on StatCounter, Daum is below 1%.

StatCounter's figure needs context. It measures referrals to sites carrying its tracking code, and Korean portals keep much of their traffic inside their own Cafe, blog and Q&A pages, which pushes their measured share down. The European Commission's 2018 Google Android decision recorded Google's own claim that StatCounter data for Korea are unreliable. Even so, every measure agrees on the direction: Daum is now a minor engine.

One widely repeated number should be dropped. The Korea Times in December 2025 put Daum's historic share at "30 to 40 percent," naming no source. The measured Korean Click data found for this page show about 20%, and the higher figure is not corroborated.

Who owns Daum: Kakao, AXZ and Upstage

Daum's ownership has changed more in the past eighteen months than in the previous decade, and any reference to "Kakao's Daum" is now out of date.

1995 to 2014: Daum Communications, founded by Lee Jae-woong.
26 May 2014: Kakao announces a stock-swap merger with Daum Communications, forming Daum Kakao, renamed Kakao in 2015. Daum is then run as an in-house unit.
22 May 2025: Kakao's board approves spinning Daum out into a wholly owned subsidiary.
1 December 2025: that subsidiary, AXZ, takes over Daum Mail, Cafe, Search, News and Shopping.
29 January 2026: AXZ and Upstage sign a memorandum of understanding premised on a share swap.
7 May 2026: Upstage announces completion of the acquisition, with Kakao taking Upstage equity in return. No price was disclosed.
20 July 2026: AXZ shareholders approve renaming the company Daum Corporation, under chief executive Lee Keonsu, formerly Upstage's head of AI search.

Two loose ends remain. In May 2026 Kakao injected KRW 16.2 billion of capital into AXZ to fund operations during the transaction. And an Asia Economy report of 15 May 2026 said Korea Fair Trade Commission merger review was still outstanding; whether clearance has since been issued is unconfirmed.

The business model is portal advertising, search and display. Under Kakao, Daum's results sat inside a wider portal segment whose figures were not retrieved for this page. Under Upstage, Daum is a data and distribution asset for an AI company.

AI plans under Upstage

Upstage has been explicit about why it bought Daum. On 7 May 2026 it said it would combine "Daum's search engine and its large database" with its own Solar large language model, as reported by the Korea Herald. Digital Today reported the same day that Upstage intends to move Daum "from traditional keyword retrieval" to a service called ContextAI that generates direct answers.

As of 27 October 2026 no dated launch of such a product has been confirmed. For now Daum remains a conventional index-based engine, and its verdict stays at own index. If a future Daum serves mainly generated answers rather than ranked results from its index, that verdict will need to be reassessed.

The logic of the purchase is plain: Daum's value to an AI company is not its small search share but an established Korean-language index and decades of Cafe and Tistory content, useful for grounding and training a Korean model.

History: Hanmail, Lycos and the Nate alliance

Daum's breakthrough product was Hanmail, the free webmail service launched in 1997. English Wikipedia gives conflicting launch dates for Daum itself, 20 December 1995 in its text and May 1997 in its infobox; "founded 1995" is the safe statement. The date Daum first ran its own full-text web search engine has not been found.

In 2004 Daum briefly became the owner of a pioneer American search brand. It acquired Lycos Korea in July 2004, and in October 2004 Terra sold the US company Lycos to Daum for $95.4 million in cash. Daum sold Lycos to Ybrant Digital in August 2010 for $36 million. By March 2009 Daum was described as South Korea's second largest web portal by daily visits.

The April 2011 alliance with Nate was an explicit attempt to counter Naver by pooling results and sharing revenue, and by January 2014 Nate was preparing to adopt Daum's search engine outright. Neither move reversed the trend.

Who Daum suits, and who it does not

Daum is a real, independent Korean index that lost its users. It was squeezed from two sides: Naver won by producing Korean-language content inside its own walls, and Google won open-web and mobile queries. The scale of the competitor is visible in Naver's own filings: its advertising revenue, search and display combined, totaled KRW 5,436.2 billion across 2025.

It suits readers who want Daum Cafe community content and Tistory posts surfaced prominently, and anyone who wants a second Korean index that is not Naver's and not Google's.

It is a poor choice for non-Korean searching, since its index is built for the Korean web, and for anyone wanting the most complete Korean results, because at under 3% share it attracts far less of the content and activity that Naver and Google draw. Its future is also uncertain: a new owner has said it intends to replace keyword retrieval with generated answers.

Common misconceptions: Daum is not owned by Kakao, not since May 2026. Daum does not use Google results; no evidence supports that, and it licensed its own engine to Nate in 2014. And Daum is no longer Korea's number-two search engine: Google is second or first depending on the measure, and Bing passed Daum in July 2024 on InternetTrend.

Daum logo history

Daum has used 6 documented logos. Each is shown with the period it can be dated to from a published source; where only a first sighting is known, the label says "by" rather than guessing a start date.

1997–2000
Daum Communications original logo

2000–2010
Multicolor wordmark set in Franklin Gothic Heavy (per Commons)

2010–2013
Refreshed multicolor wordmark

2013–2025
Daum wordmark after the Daum Communications name was retired

2025–2026
Short-lived 2025 wordmark

2026–present current

Logos are trademarks of their owners and are shown only to identify the search engine this page discusses. Files are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons and the services' own sites. See the history of search engine logos.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Daum now?

Upstage, a Korean AI company, which announced completion of its acquisition on 7 May 2026 through a share swap that gave Kakao Upstage equity. The operating company, previously AXZ, was renamed Daum Corporation after a shareholder vote on 20 July 2026. Kakao had owned Daum since their 2014 merger and spun it out as AXZ on 1 December 2025.

Does Daum have its own search engine?

Yes. Daum answers Korean web searches from its own crawler and index, and no evidence shows its organic results are resold from Google or Bing. The strongest proof is commercial: in January 2014 Daum was negotiating to license its search engine to the rival Nate portal. It also runs its own webmaster tool, which only a self-crawling engine needs.

Is Daum still Korea's second search engine?

No. On InternetTrend data Daum averaged 2.94% of Korean search in 2025, behind Naver at 62.86%, Google at 29.55% and Bing at 3.12%. Bing first passed Daum in July 2024. StatCounter put Daum at 0.73% in September 2026. Daum held about 20% of Korean searches in 2011 and 2013, per Korean Click.

Will Daum become an AI search engine?

Its owner says so. Upstage said on 7 May 2026 that it would combine Daum's search engine and database with its Solar large language model and move Daum from keyword retrieval to a service called ContextAI that generates direct answers. As of 27 October 2026 no launch date for that product has been confirmed, and Daum still serves index-based results.

Did Daum own Lycos?

Yes. Terra sold the US company Lycos to Daum in October 2004 for $95.4 million in cash, months after Daum had acquired Lycos Korea. Daum sold Lycos to Ybrant Digital in August 2010 for $36 million. For six years one of the pioneer American search brands belonged to a Korean portal.

Daum