Interesting Snippets

One of the strange hangovers of the let’s-block-competitors-and-do-everything-ourselves mentality that is thankfully declining in South Korea is that when government agencies were building Web sites in the 1990s and early 2000s, they blocked access to global search engines.

Part of the thinking, no doubt, was that this would cause South Koreans to favor local search engines rather than the global players like Google and Yahoo. South Korea-based Naver and Daum do dominate the nation’s Web search market and control its online advertising market….
On Monday night, one of Google’s top engineers, Matt Cutts, gave a presentation to about 80 government officials, attorneys, webmasters and journalists to illustrate the problem. “If a country turns away from the open Web, it risks turning into an island,” Mr. Cutts said.
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One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.