Seoul: The rate of online searches via Naver Corp., South Korea's leading internet portal operator, in the country has seen a significant drop over the past nine years amid growing competition, an industry report showed Monday. The Korean portal giant took up a 57.32 percent share of the domestic search engine market in the first 10 months of this year, followed by global search engine Google at 33.9 percent. According to Yonhap News Agency, Naver's share was more than 20 percentage points lower than the corresponding tally of 78.06 percent in 2015. At the time, Google ranked No. 3, with a mere 7.31 percent, trailing after Daum, a local internet portal currently operated by Kakao Corp., at 11.74 percent. The report indicated that artificial intelligence (AI) technology has significantly shifted the paradigm of the search market. This change was particularly noted after OpenAI's ChatGPT, a generative AI model, was released in 2022. The shift moved from offering a list of information to users' questions to pr oviding more customized and summarized answers. This year, foreign search engines with AI features, including those of Google and Microsoft, have shown sharp growth in the domestic market. In response, Naver announced its plan to apply AI technology to its search platform last week to provide more tailored answers to users' queries in line with the global trend. Naver has also been testing a separate generative AI search service developed last year, named "Cue:". The green bar in the report's graph represents the shift in Naver Corp.'s share in the South Korean search engine market between the January-October period in 2015 and 2024, with the blue representing Daum and red showing Google.