A new Vietnamese-language search engine, developed by Russians, was launched last week – almost two years after the idea for the project was first floated and a tentative launch date of April 1, 2011 had been announced. The search engine, christened Côc Côc (which stands for “rat-a-tat” in Vietnamese) is now up and running, and tailored to Vietnamese users.
In an exchange with the Russian business daily Vedomosti, Viktor Lavrenko, the co-founder of Nigma.ru, the little-known Russian search engine behind the project, said the Vietnamese customisation project has cost his company $15 million, with the money spent predominantly on equipment and payroll for about 40 Russian programmers who moved to Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi.
Côc Côc will now vie with Google’s regional localization, the four-language ‘Google.com.vn,’ along with one-year-old ‘Wada.vn.’ The latter is another search engine project originating in Russia. It was launched last year by Russia’s Ashmanov & Partners, Finam, and Kazakhstan’s Kusto, with seed capital of just $1.5 million. So far, Wada.vn still ranks 716th on Vietnam’s web traffic list, but the search engine is betting heavily on an aggressive promotion unleashed last fall as well as on Kusto’s business connections in Vietnam’s social network and online discounter sectors.
Determined to carve out a decent niche in an Internet market that shows double-digit growth and makes heavy use of Facebook and YouTube, Côc Côc is ready to serve the needs of Vietnam’s small businesses – a fairly well-developed sector of the Vietnamese economy, according to Lavrenko – with geo-targeted contextual advertising services that convey “a local flavor.” A proprietary database of cafés, gas stations, and other searchable business locations is already growing, the entrepreneur said.
Vietnam is not the final destination in Southeast Asia for Lavrenko’s team. He is planning to launch a whole network of localized search engines across the region, generating as much as $1 billion a year in expected revenue.
Expert commentary – by Vuong Vu Thang, founder and CEO, Vietnam Communication Corporation (VCC)
Challenging the domination of Google in Vietnam is an extremely difficult mission as there are almost no major technical or language barriers for Google to understand and index contents in Vietnamese. With all its massive funding, Côc Côc still needs to persuade Vietnamese users to change their habits. And this requires more than just technological sophistication or an excellent user interface.
Côc Côc’s serious investment in a mobile platform would enable a unique arrangement of search results and allow the search engine to utilize advanced built-in smartphone technology such as GPS, cameras, and sharing ability. More importantly, the mobile platform would allow Côc Côc to reach and educate a whole new set of users on a large scale. Therefore, I feel moderately optimistic about Côc Côc and hope to see many breakthrough innovations from this search engine.
- An Internet pioneer in Vietnam, Vuong Vu Thang founded some of the first Vietnamese online communities, online media companies and e-commerce capacities in the early 2000s. Mobile applications and services followed in 2005. Today, VCC stands as one of the leading digital groups in Vietnam.
