Wikipedia
Naver ( Hangul: 네이버) is a popular Web portal in South Korea, owned by Naver Corporation. Naver was launched in June 1999 by ex- Samsung employees, and it debuted as the first Web portal in South Korea that used its own proprietary search engine. Among Naver's features is "Comprehensive Search", launched in 2000, which provides results from multiple categories on a single page. It has since added new services such as " Knowledge Search", launched in 2002. It also provides Internet services including a news service, an e-mail service, an academic thesis search service, and a children's portal. In 2005, Naver launched Happybean, the world's first online donation portal, which allows users to find information and make donations to over 20,000 civil society and social welfare organizations.
According to comScore, Naver received 2 billion queries in August 2007, accounting for over 70% of all search queries in Korea, and making it the fifth most used search engine in the world, following Google search, Yahoo!, Baidu and Bing. More than 25 million Koreans have Naver as the default browser start page. Naver launched its service in Japan in 2009, marking their first expansion out of Korea.
In 2013, Lee Hae-jin, the chairman and chief strategy of Naver, saw his stake value hover above 1 trillion won (US$939.4 million) on the back of its messenger service LINE.