Empas (

hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The l ...

: 엠파스) was one of the popular total

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

search Searching or search may refer to: Computing technology * Search algorithm, including keyword search ** :Search algorithms * Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence * Search engine technology, software for find ...

tools and

web portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayi ...

sites in

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

. The service was launched in 1998 by Knowledge Plant Corporation (), which changed its name to Empas Corporation in 2004. The name ''Empas'' is a combination of ''e-media'' and ''compass''. Before its merger with Nate in 2009, Empas was one of South Korea's most popular web search engines, and competed with

Yahoo! Korea Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

, Daum, Nate, and

Naver Naver (Hangul: 네이버) is a South Korean online platform operated by the Naver Corporation. It was launched in 1999 as the first web portal in South Korea to develop and use its own search engine. It was also the world's first operator to ...

. Empas was the second most popular web portal in the country from 2000 to 2001, by unique page view, behind

. Since the dominance of

started in 2003, however, the market share of Empas declined, and by late 2005, it had fallen into the fifth place amongst the South Korean web portals. In 2006, aiming to check its main competition Naver's rapid expansion, SK Communications (which owned South Korea's popular social networking website

Cyworld Cyworld () is a South Korean social network service. Cyworld was originally part of SK communication, and became an independent company in 2014. Members cultivate relationships by forming ''Ilchon'' (, Hanja: ) or "friendships" with each other ...

) acquired Empas on 19 October 2006. With the reorganisation of SK Communications's business fields, Empas was merged with Nate.com, which was the original web portal of SK Communications, and became Nate on 1 March 2009.

References

External links

Empas on 27 February 2009, days before it became the Nate website

Nate, successor to Empas

SK Communications, Inc.
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